I've recently been thinking about our withdrawal from Iraq. One of the points that seems to come fairly often when this subject is raised is the idea that withdrawing troops before the mission in Iraq is accomplished (a flowering of democracy, to whatever extent we'd like to see) would render all the 2000+ deaths of American soldiers meaningless. I think that this is a pernicious and deeply mistaken view. We see it on both sides of the political aisle.

Ben Stein wrote, shortly before Thanksgiving:

I have a voluminous correspondence with soldiers and Marines in Iraq. To a man and woman, they do not want to walk away and make their comrades' deaths meaningless. They hate the war. They hate the dying. They grieve. So do their families. But they believe in their mission and they do not want their brothers' losses to be in vain.

On the opposite side, Cindy Sheehan wrote some time ago:

I came here two and a half weeks ago for one reason, to try and see the president and get an answer to a very simple question: What is the noble cause that he says my son died for? The answer to that question will not bring my son back. But it may stop more meaningless deaths. Because every death is now a meaningless one.

I don't question the sincerity of people who say such things. (Well, okay, I question the sincerity of some Republican cheerleaders.) But what they seem to be saying in general is that high-level political decisions have a bearing on whether someone's death is meaningful or meaningless. Does that sound right? Not to me. On the "stay the course" side, does anyone seriously hold the view that soldiers' deaths up to this point are potentially meaningful but won't achieve full meaning until the mission is accomplished? Or perhaps that past soldiers' deaths are meaningful now but would become meaningless if our current leadership changed course in Iraq?

I think that a much more personal view of the meaningfulness of someone's death (and life, for that matter) is appropriate. For a concrete example, I've recently been reading Black Hawk Down. Many if not all of the soldiers who died in that battle did so protecting their comrades. Even if the mission hadn't been successful in the end, who could say that their deaths were meaningless or that they'd died in vain? Not the survivors.

It's easy to get caught up in the idea that the meaning of soldiers' lives is determined by the success or failure of some military objective. I think that this is basically wrong; soldiers are human beings, not pieces in a strategy game.