Endings and beginnings on the cusp of 2012

As the year draws to a close, President Obama has declared the war in Iraq over; and so, a sad episode in America’s story has ended. “Welcome home,” the president told the troops. “Welcome home.”

It was a somber moment because in the air, in the chronicles of the war, in the memories of surviving parents and husbands and wives were thoughts of loved ones, the very loves of their lives, killed in Iraq. Roadside bombs, mortar attacks, ambushes and firefights killed too many thousands of American kids way before their time. What hurts, too, is the erosion of integrity in foreign policy that led us into a wrong-minded war for reasons that proved illusory. Ah, yes, the elusive Weapons of Mass Destruction. Not a good reason for any soldier to die, not to mention the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians who also perished.

Last week, with a straight face, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta paid tribute to “an independent, free and sovereign Iraq.” The day before, according to Reuters, gunmen blew up a bus carrying Iraqi judges, killing three and wounding five. The same day, reported The New York Times, U.S. Marines swore to tell the truth and began giving testimony about the 2005 massacre by American soldiers of Iraqi civilians in Haditha. Also the same day, gunmen shot dead a police colonel, part of the Iraqi Interior Ministry, outside his house in Mosul.

Last Friday there was an end of sorts, too, of a literary luminary. Christopher Hitchens, a writer of incandescent intellect, died of esophageal cancer. I heard him speak at the 92nd Street Y shortly after he was diagnosed, about two years ago. He had stepped out the side door of the Y and was smoking a cigarette. Yes, he was a contrarian. He was also a brilliant political commentator, a devout atheist, a patriotic American, a prolific writer of essays and books and a fierce debater. You could argue with him, but you would lose. I have never heard anyone speak the way he did, with such command of the language, seeming to pull from the air the perfect words for the thought he wished to articulate.

I said his death was an end “of sorts” because writing is a hedge against mortality, and he has etched his name in the minds of all of us who love his work.