Good for Senator Tom Cotton — a veteran of the Old Guard — for his statement commending President Trump for taking the time, at the invitation of a Gold Star family, to visit Arlington Cemetery last month. His critics erred in suggesting it was a violation of a rule against politicking at the graves. Trump, in any event, did the right thing in stepping away from his campaigning to pay respects at our national shrine to courage and patriotism. 

One of the points that Mr. Cotton marked is that the Gold Star families “had every right to invite whomever they wanted to commemorate this solemn anniversary, just as President Trump and his aides had every right to accept their invitation; neither the families nor President Trump violated cemetery regulations or policies.” Why, one could ask, weren’t representatives of the Biden administration there?

National Public Radio quotes Congressman Brian Mast of Florida, who accompanied Trump at Arlington, as saying “President Trump conducted no politics at Arlington National Cemetery.” Video of the visit did go up on a Trump campaign website, but that, in our view, hardly turns a private visit to Arlington by a Gold Star family into a campaign activity. In our view, it was President Biden and the Army secretary who were playing politics by objecting to the visit.

“The real scandal here isn’t that the families invited President Trump or that he accepted their invitation,” Senator Cotton said. And it’s not even that “political apparatchiks” working for the secretary of the Army “disrespected the wishes of these Gold Star families.” We, for one, don’t think Trump or his hosts got anywhere near violating federal law on this head, even if video went up on his election site. These visits deserve to be widely viewed.

No, Senator Cotton suggested, the real scandal is the errors of the Biden administration that left 13 American Marines and a soldier fatally exposed during the catastrophe of the surrender of Afghanistan. It’s shocking the way Democrats have sought to make political hay during both the Trump and Biden presidencies by suggesting that the 45th president detests our soldiers. That’s a laughable libel in the context of the political debate this year.

Both sides, after all, seem to be arguing against the so-called endless wars. We’re of the view that America didn’t launch any of these wars, and it’s only retreat and appeasement that will turn them into endless conflicts. War, though, as Clausewitz taught, is politics by other means. So it’s as inevitable as rain in the tropics that politics and war — and even a simple visit to the grave of a lost son — become entangled. 

Senator Cotton, after leading a platoon of the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, was assigned to the Old Guard. That’s the unit that, among other duties, protects Arlington and performs many of the honors there. Mr. Cotton later wrote a wonderful book — “Sacred Duty” — about the Old Guard. In it, he wrote, “we live in politically divided times.” Yet the fields of Arlington “are one place where we can set aside our differences.”