On November 11th, 1918, the Central Powers surrendered to signed an armistice with the Allies in a railroad car in the forest of Compiègne in Northern France, marking the end of what was then known as the Great War. Ever since, November 11th has been commemorated by the 1918 allied nations - the UK, France, Canada, the United States, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand – as the occasion of what was clearly understood to be more deliverance than victory.

Veterans Day 2006 finds us not in a war, but in occupation of a foreign country that rather clearly does not want us there. What was supposed to be a war, a 'war on terror', has succumbed to the usual difficulties of making war on a noun rather than a country.

Meanwhile, the men and women of our Armed Forces have been subjected to carnage in a war of occupation, without having been given the tools, such as body armor, to prevail. What they got instead was photo ops, plastic turkeys on a platter held by a smiling draft-dodger. At the same time, the United States government, run by men and women who without exception did not see combat, did not do them the simple honor of executing the occupation the military fought to achieve with anything approaching competence. What we, and they, got instead was an employment program for the hyper-ideological spawn of Washington think tanks, a laboratory experiment for the so-called 'conservative movement'. The first thing ordered by Viceroy Bremer, even before he disbanded the defeated Iraqi army, was the privatization of the Iraqi energy industry. He moved on to impose a flat tax, invite foreign investors, and stand aside as looters ransacked the museums of Iraq. Bremer opened the Iraqi stock exchange before the main hospital in Baghdad had an uninterrupted power supply. Read about it, here and here.

As any normal human being can glean from the headlines and the evening news with its maddening drumbeat of casualties, that conservative experiment has failed. The architects of this disaster have been punished at the polls. A new group of veterans has been elected to Congress, as Democrats.

What remains is this: to explain to the more than 20,000 maimed, and the families of almost 3,000 dead, why their service was required, and why their sacrifice was not treated with more respect by those in power. And yes, honesty and competence should be considered as the bare minimum of respect. As the country commemorates its veterans today, it will be thinking about those who demanded so much sacrifice, and gave in return so little honesty and achievement. Our men and women were sent into combat to prove the theories of the Project for a New American Century and the Heritage Foundation.

Commemorate that.

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