hal, I strongly disagree.
No, their sacrifices are not pointless. That's about the worst thing you can say IMHO. Why they are there, or what motivations their leaders had is completely irrelevent.
Absolutely untrue. Let's envision two scenarios.
1: America is under domestic attack by Country X, which seeks to make our country a part of X empire and force us to follow Y religion. American soldiers fight and die so that today's Americans, and those yet to come, can continue to live in a democratic, pluralistic society.
2. A delusional, paranoid American leader decides that the only way to save America is for us to attack Great Britain and impose a new government on the British people. Britain does not take kindly to our invasion and fights back forcefully, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of American and British soldiers. Were it not for the war, Britain would have been our friend and ally - there would have been no significant tension between the countries. Those hundreds of thousands of American soldiers
did not die to enable us to preserve our democratic and pluralistic society, for it was not actually threatened by the British. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of British soldiers are now dead. All of those deaths - both American and British - were pointless. I would go one step further and say, their deaths did far more harm than good, in that the deaths on both sides have now severely, perhaps terminally, impacted foreign relations between two significant countries.
It is
absolutely relevant to the question of whether a person's sacrifice had any meaning, why a person has been sent into war.
They chose to fight for a country they believed in. And they faught as they were trained to fight. As they must be trained to fight to minimize loss of life. They chose to fight and they were willing to die for what they believed in.
That's nice, glorious, and romantic. The reality is that those people have lost their lives - lost their lives in the process (in the aggregate) of taking other lives. And, the collective loss of life has harmed our country financially, morale-wise, foreign relations-wise, and in terms of the loss of productive citizens.
Being willing to die for what you believe in is only commendable if what you believe in is worthwhile - and if your death actually furthers the cause you believe in. If you go into war because you believe A, but really, A is
weakened rather than advanced by your being sent into war - then your sacrifice has been worse than futile: your death did more harm than good.
Who gave the orders, and why the orders were given does not diminish their sacrifice in any way.
It does not diminish the magnitude of their sacrifice - it merely means that their sacrifice has had no positive consequence/has actually had a negative consequence, making it doubly tragic.
You can hate the war, you can hate the politicians responsible for it, you can hate the politicians trying to undermine the effort right now... but whatever you hate... do not forget that those soldiers are dying for YOU... and they've never even met you.
No, they are not dying for me. If their deaths furthered my ability "to yell and scream that they shouldn't want to die for [me]," then I would agree with you. But they have not advanced my ability to "yell and scream" in any way, by waging a pointless battle that has devastated a nation (or is that two?) and further destabilized one of the most volatile regions in the world.
Of course I do not hate the soldiers - many of them kids my age or younger. But the very fact that they are not dying for me, or anyone else in this country, causes me to feel hatred for those who have sent innocent youth to die, futilely, thousands of miles away from home.