Today, on September 11, 2009, I was moved to do some further research on a distant relative of mine named Amy Toyen. Amy died eight years ago in the WTC attacks. I never knew her, but I feel like I know a little about her now. This may sound like a familiar opening for a 9/11 tribute, but if you think you know where I'm going with it, you may be surprised.

A year and half ago, on March 19, I took a break from my downtown Portland job to go for a run. Normally, when I go running I like to travel light, but on that day I carried my digital camera with me. I wanted to photograph a display set up by Portland State University students to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. At one end of the broad, tree-shaded Park Avenue median that reaches from the heart of downtown Portland like a vibrant green artery up into the PSU campus, students had planted hundreds of little red flags in the grass. A nearby placard explained that each flag represented five American servicemen or women killed since the invasion began. The total at that time stood at about 4,000, a tragic toll indeed. In all, I would estimate the field of red flagsat about ten by fifty feet. I stood there for a while, camera dangling at my side from its wrist strap, trying to comprehend that each flag represented not one but five Americans who had been killed in Iraq since the invasion. Five dedicated Americans killed. Five families in mourning. Times several hundred.

But what took my breath away, for its sheer magnitude, was the field of white flags stretching away from where the red ones left off and continuing up the Park Avenue median, blanketing the green grass block after block after block, to an eventual termination somewhere beyond my line of sight. The same placard explained that each white flag represented five Iraqis killed since the invasion of their country. Although the exact number will never be known, even conservative estimates range from 100,000 to well over half a million. Some peg it at a million.You can subtract off the combatants and still arrive at similar numbers, numbers that can only be comprehended visually, if at all. Each white flag represented five Iraqis killed, five Iraqi families in mourning. Five human tragedies strangely invisible to our American eyes. Why? Because they were not us? Because they were merely regrettable "collateral damage"?

Does that imply that we regard innocent Iraqi lives and Iraqi families, Iraqi students and teachers and businessmen and women and merchants and firefighters and police and librarians and children killed in their homeland, as somehow less precious than their American counterparts? Is it because we can't put a face on their tragedies like we can with our own? Is it because their list is too long and incomplete to enumerate as we do our own?

And what did they die for, as if they had any more choice than the 9/11 victims? Can their deaths mean something too? Or do we even care? Long before most of them died, we learned that there were no WMD's and no links whatsoever to Al Qaeda (as President Bush himself publicly acknowledged). And, worse, after all the bloodshed that continues to this day, we are not an inch closer to the real perpetrators of 9/11, Osama bin Laden and his terrorist organization. Oh yeah, invading Iraq was supposed to avenge the 9/11 attacks. Sorry about that.

Call it what you will -- a war based on a lie, an "honest mistake", a major intelligence failure -- there is general agreement these days, even among former supporters, that the invasion of Iraq was at very least ... unnecessary.

What a slap in the face to the Iraqis (and the Afghans, let's not forget) that their deaths are not acknowledged on this day or any other day. What a slap in the face to the grieving families, two hundred for each American family. What a slap in the face that the architects of the Iraq war, far from being held accountable by the Obama administration, get to collect speaking engagement fees, book royalties and in some cases regularly appear on television to pontificate about -- incomprehensibly -- national security.

As a gleaming memorial goes up at Ground Zero in Manhattan to honor those Americans who died there, I think the greatest honor we could bestow upon them would be to imagine what they themselves would have wanted, what kind of legacy they would have wanted left in their names -- so they they (and their families) would feel that they had not died in vain.

The victims of 9/11 were a varied cross section of humanity, but by and large they were a highly educated, worldly group of New Yorkers and nearby New Englanders. Although I never knew Amy, the remembrances I read about her suggest that she was a kind and big hearted young woman with a concern for people everywhere.

Going by those measures -- New York culture in general and Amy in particular -- I think that it would honor their memory in a far deeper way if we did not exclude non-American innocents from the roster of 9/11 victims. I think the memorial now being erected on their sacred ground should acknowledge not only American deaths but the staggering loss of our innocent sisters and brothers who died as a direct or indirect consequence of 9/11 on their own sacred grounds in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I would like to think that, despite the recent bad behavior of my beloved America, she will once again show her true big-hearted nature and remember on every 9/11 hereafter not just her own pain, but the pain of ALL who suffered in the after in the aftermath of the World Trade Center bombings of September 11, 2001.

I thinkdoing sowould honor the victims and I think it would honor the best in the American character.