The decision to send men and women from our armed services into harm's way is an awesome responsibility. Hopefully the decision is never made lightly by political leadership and the reasons are sound. There are times when armed conflict cannot be avoided. Some leaders in the past have sent thousands to their deaths for the sake of territorial gain or national pride or even just survival. Freedom and justice have to be fought for with blood. Moreover, to defend that freedom, men and women have to know what they are fighting for and that their deaths are meaningful as was the case in WW2.

Biden called Putin a "killer." I know of few leaders past or present who are not killers to some degree. Some have the blood of millions on their hands such as Mao Tse Tung or Hitler or Ghengis Khan. Winston Churchill threw lives away at Gallipoli and and in Greece and in Singapore. But he defended freedom. Perhaps all discussions of leaders should come with some sort of star rating system. Is a leader a five- or one-star killer? The number of deaths attributed doesn't have to come just from warfare. They can equally be as a result of negligence such as letting a pandemic rage across the country or allowing genocide or ethnic cleansing.

The Afghanistan and Iraq wars involved sending men and women to fight to dislodge forces and regimes to which America was opposed. Pretexts were found or invented. The aftermath in both cases was political disintegration, factionalism and social instability. The wars left power vacuums which led to drawn out civil conflicts. 7,036 Americans lost their lives in these two conflicts. We have to ask whether the sacrifice was worthwhile. Donald Rumsfeld was the brains behind and architect of both. He sent men to their deaths with apparent little hesitation. He lied to the public and to Congress. History has judged him as a man more concerned with his image and his mark in the history books than in the consequences of his own actions on the lives of others.

I am a firm believer in the "Blood on the Hands" theory of history where success is measured by each individual's responsibility for his fellow man. I personally and philosophically accept the responsibility of being my brother's and sister's keeper wherever they live. If I were responsible for allowing a pandemic to rage or imprisoned millions of people whose religion or ethnicity I didn't like or sent in tanks to crush my best students into mush then washed them down the drain, or marketed drugs which I knew made people addicted and killed them, or made profits from agricultural chemicals I knew would poison, that is my responsibility to history and to life here on this planet. It's a simple theory. We all have to die. We all must ask ourselves the same questions. "Did I improve the life of my fellow man or did I care only for myself and my own gain? Did I nurture the planet which gave me life?" Idealistic? Perhaps, but describe an alternative vision because the present vision of personal consumption, wealth accumulation, territorial gain and environmental destruction does not appear to be working particularly well.