In assessing post-celebration realities of the national moment, it may help to recall that America has never been an innocent nation, which is seen in its having constantly sought to appear as one. Indeed, the planting of the flag in self-affirming virtue is how the hallowed standard comes most readily under fire. The most poignant honoring of the flag of which I know is the US Marine Corps Memorial in Arlington, the magnificent bronze rendering of the famous Joe Rosenthal photograph of five weary leathernecks and a Navy medic raising the flag on Iwo Jima. That statue, not the Mussolini-like showcase of plinths, pillars, wreaths, and fountains that now despoils the Mall, should be the nation's memorial to World War II.

Even as the valor of what they did on one beachhead after another is properly honored, the American fighters of the Pacific War were not heroes. The desperation of island combat included exchanged barbarities of which no one would willingly speak for a generation. On the American side, there were foul racism, vengeful refusals to take prisoners, a generalized brutality that extended to a savage air war.

What kind of nation does our flag fly over now? Not a less innocent one, because American innocence was never the truth. Not one less reluctant to go to war without a good reason, because we have foolishly credited bad reasons in the past. But now the nation lacks even that. As our president demonstrated last week, we have become a people who wage unending war -- killing and maiming our young ones and theirs -- without being remotely able to say why.