Today is Memorial Day, when we are supposed to honor the men and women who have died in war.

An American soldier was killed in an explosion south of Baghdad yesterday, and another was killed in an ambush in Baghdad today. According to the U.S. government, however, there is no longer a war, so these soldiers died in...what? A misunderstanding? A political conflict?

Someone forgot to tell the Pentagon that Iraq is still fighting the war. Looting, vandalism, impure water, disease, political upheaval, the stripping away of women's rights--they are all right there, for everyone to see. When you blow a country up, it's a good idea to have a plan for preventing out-and-out anarchistic chaos. But there is no P.R. benefit in that, so such a plan--if it ever existed--was not put into play until just recently.

This is a nation that loves to talk about honoring its war veterans, but in reality, we have abused them repeatedly. The government has never taken responsibility for what happened to the men in Vietnam who sprayed Agent Orange, and there is still no satisfaction for those who returned from Desert Storm with Gulf War Syndrome (which for years the government said didn't really exist). U.S. military hospitals and veterans' hospitals are often hopelessly inadequate and even dangerous, and military women have to worry about sexual assault and the covering up of sexual assault.

And now we have seen U.S. soldiers die because of Bush's liberation of Halliburton. They are dying as I write this.

Happy Memorial Day.