Anniversaries offer time of reflection

We recently passed the 100-year anniversary of a tragic event and the 50-year anniversary of another.

World War I started on July 28, 1914. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was approved on Aug. 7, 1964.

All wars are evil and all could have been avoided if individuals, tribes, leaders and countries had practiced common decency and common sense. But some wars are more vile, more unjustified than your run-of-the-mill war. World War I and the Vietnam War fit that description.

Not only was World War I the most devastating the world had ever seen, it did not lead to peace. Despite the widespread horror at the carnage of World War I, World War II grew out of the seeds of World War I.

On Aug. 7, 1964, the U.S. Senate voted 88-2 to approve the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, henceforth used as the legal basis for the U.S. war in Vietnam.

Only two senators, Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, had the courage to say no.

The Vietnam Veterans' Memorial wall in D.C., which lists the 58,286 U.S. troops who died in the war, is about 150 yards long. If a similar wall were built for the Vietnamese who were killed in the war, the wall would stretch for miles. People are still dying today from the war's Agent Orange and land mines.

The anniversaries are an opportunity to understand our past and thus more effectively wage peace in our war-torn present.

John Jadryev

Iowa City