Keith C. Burris.

As we approach our fourth Christmas mired in the increasingly hopeless misadventure in Iraq, I am reading about war and politics--what we have done, and what we should do.

Garrison Keillor's Homegrown Democrat (Penguin, $10.99, 272 pp.) is an apologia for that thin reed of hope known as the Democratic Party--and it's an angry and oddly upbeat book. It will also make you laugh, sometimes out loud, a feature not available in most "how the Dems can win" books. But there is a serious point. Why don't Democrats talk about the social contract when they run for office? Homegrown Democrat suggests that liberals ought not apologize for believing we are our brothers' keepers. As in all of Keillor's books, the tonic chord here is Minnesota, a place where all the old rules still apply. Don't talk while you are chewing. Don't interrupt when other people are talking. Don't tell your friends what they should read. Don't go to a party and talk only about yourself. In Minnesota, being a good neighbor is not just the point of politics, but of life itself. Keillor suggests that Democrats dig down beneath the surface of heartland community and rediscover their core beliefs.

Minnesota produced two great public men in the last century--Hubert H. Humphrey and Eugene J. McCarthy, who died just last December. When he spoke at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, a few years ago, McCarthy was introduced by former Senator Mark Hatfield, who held up a copy of McCarthy's 1967 book The Limits of Power. In it, McCarthy argued that American foreign policy should be "more restrained and ... more closely in keeping with the movement of history." He urged the United States to treat international agencies with a "decent respect to the opinion of mankind"; to restrain our use of the CIA and our sale of arms abroad; and to empower the Senate to exercise its constitutional function to conduct foreign policy. It was, and is, a solid platform. When Bill Clinton eulogized McCarthy at the National Cathedral in January of this year, he remarked that every time a member of Congress asks if we have seen enough evidence to vote for war, and every time a president thinks twice before ordering the use of military power, McCarthy's influence is felt. Isn't this the least our leaders owe those sent to fight in war?

I am not sure that any book can fully convey what war is--maybe only film can come close. But two remarkable recent books strip away war's veneer of glory. Jarhead, by ex-Marine Anthony Swofford (Scribner, $24, 260 pp.), recounts his demoralizing experiences in the first Persian Gulf war. Swofford is ruthlessly honest, and the psychological terrain he surveys is deeply unsettling. You have to keep putting the book down; it cannot be swallowed whole. War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges (Anchor Books, $12.95, 199 pp.), is equally dark, the writing equally fine. Hedges writes of his time as a New York Times correspondent covering the current Iraq war. Like George Orwell, he believes that war is the most potent narcotic ever devised, and that mankind is addicted.

Were I teaching a course on war, I would begin with these two books, and then I would play Robert Shaw's recording of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, the most eloquent antiwar statement--and the most disturbing piece of music--I have ever heard. Britten inserts into the Mass the biting antiwar poetry of Wilfred Owen, a promising English poet who died in World War I. It's not easy listening. Finally, I would take the class to see Flags of Our Fathers, the first half of Clint Eastwood's Iwo Jima magnum opus (the second half, Letters from Iwo Jima, telling the story from the Japanese point of view, is scheduled to open in February). All these works of art, reportage, and confession present war without moral or theological assurances, without political certainty, and without easy justification. Did dropping the bomb on Hiroshima save the lives of even more Americans? Perhaps; but that does not nullify the evil of dropping the bomb. Evil is absolute and not divisible. Eastwood, Hedges, and Swofford are not pacifists, nor are they suggesting that heroism does not exist in war. Rather, they are insisting on the human costs of heroism--and not only for the dead, but for the living as well. Owen wrote that his subject "is War and the pity of War," adding, "The Poetry is the Pity."

Some weeks back, my newspaper published a photo that shook me so much, I cut it out and put it on our refrigerator at home. It was of two young men in one of the towns my paper covers. In addition to the standard teen outfit of T-shirts and baggy pants, they wore expressions of bottomless, dumb grief. They were, perhaps, nineteen or twenty years old, and they were watching a hearse bear their friend and classmate--killed in Iraq--to a local funeral home. One kid's shirt bore a picture of himself and his dead buddy, with the words "Best Friends for Eternity."

Robert Shaw said that Britten wrote his requiem to protest "youth massacred and innocence outraged." War and the pity of war: the least we owe any nineteen-year-old we send to fight in a foreign land is some comprehension of it.

Keith C. Burris is editorial page editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. He is at work on a biography of Robert Shaw.