A comedy of errors is taking a tragic toll

It’s all beginning to sound a little like a comic opera, something out of Gilbert & Sullivan, with the very dim and proper model of a modern major general running things. But the difference between that and the reality of Iraq is that people are dying.

One can imagine all the blustering and bumping into each other on stage, somber but somehow ridiculous generals, chests bristling with medals, promising vengeance through operations bearing the whimsical names of Resolute Sword and Valiant Resolve, and all the empty grandeur and hoo-ha that accompanies the scene.

But people are dying.

I listen to the verbiage of a president trying to figure out what’s going on, and I scratch my head in confusion as he scratches his head in confusion, and all of the senators and members of the House and the FBI and the CIA and Condoleezza Rice and the American Legion scratch their heads in confusion.

What began as a go-it-alone invasion to find those pesky weapons of mass destruction and turned into an effort to liberate the people of Iraq, whether they wanted it or not, is now a blood-soaked drive to bring them democracy, whether they want it or not.

Former friends are now enemies and former enemies are still enemies, and now we’re begging former friends we once ignored to be our friends again, but they are not thus inclined. Forgive us, U.N., we knew not what we were doing.

And meanwhile, people are dying.

We have a leader who got us into all this in the first place, who dressed up like a warrior, which he never was, and declared the war over, when it wasn’t, and then urged the enemies in Iraq to, more or less, come and get us, which they are doing with frightening efficiency.

He is a war president, our leader declared, and then he marched off to Texas to fish, while his faithful steady-betty, Condoleezza, took the heat.

What we’re fighting are whispers and shadows, forms that duck in and out of the light to kill one, maybe two, maybe a dozen, to take hostages and laugh over the bodies of our people and their people, because killing and humiliation are what war is all about.

I keep thinking about the footage at the end of the Vietnam War, with everyone clamoring to get onto the helicopters taking our guys and some of our old friends out as the legions of Ho Chi Minh sent us running like frightened dogs from a war we never should have been fighting in the first place.

I keep thinking that Iraq is all so deja vu, so like what we’ve been through before, although it’s not the jungles of Vietnam or the snowy mountains of Korea this time. This time it’s sand and heat and an enemy with a holy mission.

But people are still dying.

I can’t figure it out. We never seem to learn. History, given the perspective of time, will lump all these “small” wars together into a few pages and call it maybe a post-World War II adjustment period or an American Apocalypse or a Last Crusade, or just an era when, if the whole world didn’t hate us, at least it didn’t like us very much.

We were such a noble people once, the Greatest Generation that Tom Brokaw wrote about, freeing the world from horror, then moving in with the kind of compassion the planet had never seen before to help old enemies rebuild, and old wounds to heal.

What I can’t figure out is how one man, waving a flag and talking big, could lead us where we didn’t belong for a reason that didn’t exist, and is still talking like we’re winning. Winning what? Certainly not friends. Even Poland is rethinking its options, and Spain has already paid a horrible price in a holy war no one understands.

And people in buses and on trains and in convoys and on foot or tending their children or looking for work or shopping for dinner are dying.

I deplore the madness of it all, the political explanations for human suffering, the suicide killings in the name of Allah, the bombings, the missiles flying like flashes of God’s own lightning toward targets that dissolve into sand and steel and human flesh.

I deplore the fact that we are being led by a sound-bite president at a time when we need wisdom and vision in the Oval Office. I deplore the bickering, the coverups, the excuses, the lies, the name-calling and the smugness from our capitol as the enemy army grows and blood spills in greater quantities.

Don’t they understand? It isn’t Gilbert & Sullivan, it’s an American tragedy, and it’s full of pain and sadness, and we can’t figure a way out. There’s nothing amusing about that, nothing heroic, nothing elevating.

People are dying.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.