After describing the carnage of the World War I battle of the Somme, future president Herbert Hoover remarked that in another even more dreadful sense he saw inhuman policies of war:Â Â
That was the determination on both sides to bring subjection by starvation. The food blockade by the Allied Governments on the one side, and the ruthless submarine warfare by the Central Powers on the other, had this as its major purpose. Both sides professed that it was not their purpose to starve women and children. But it is an idiot who thinks soldiers ever starve. It was women and children who died of starvation. It was they who died of the disease which came from short food supplies, not in hundreds of thousands, but in millions. And after the Armistice came famine and pestilence, in which millions perished and other millions grew up stunted in mind and body. That is war. Let us not forget.
Tragically, most Americans did forget. On this fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, let us never forget the evil deeds of the architects of the war and the congressmen who continue to fund it.