People will die in this new war in Iran as they are in Iraq, as they did in Vietnam—as people do in war—by the tens of thousands or millions . . . one irreversible death at a time. 

Families will be vaporized as they huddle together and cry and fowl themselves in fear and pray to whichever god they believe is listening. A child will die from a single bullet to the brain or in pieces. The dead will become carrion and the dogs and the rats and the crows will grow fat.

And when the bombing stops and the blood and pieces of flesh and viscera are washed away and down the sewer, history will have been made and the Foolish Generation will be indicted.

We will not be able to camouflage our culpability within the mottled grey of words such as “terrorism” and “genocide.”  We will have committed the murder of innocent daughters and sons and mothers and fathers on a massive scale. There can be no mincing of words. It is mass murder. And our foolishness is no defense.

During his warmongering at the East Literature Magnet School, President Bush stressed the importance of youngsters understanding history because it gives them “a better sense of what it means to be an American.” Imagine youngsters in Berlin in 1939 listening to a similar speech by their warmongering Furher. Now imagine their sense of what it meant to be a German in 1945, tainted as they were by the blood on their parents’ hands. History has not been kind to those youngsters.

If our Foolish Generation cannot find a way to extricate itself from the black hole of history into which it is plunging, our children’s blood-spattered generation will face the court of world opinion with a weak defense:

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me . . . and my issue in perpetuity.”