WAR IS MESSY

Because we live in an environment where so few people have military experience and the general public has no personal investment in an untenable fiasco, war is often viewed like it's the movies. In the movies, directors can make it turn out however they want or they can use their imagination (see review on In The Valley of Etah). Not so in real life and especially at war. If we have ever had an example of a spinned philosophy gone awry, Iraq is it. The movies can't even make it turn out right.

Iraq is a media war. We have soldiers writing books, blogging battles, not to mention professional journalists embedded, sending missiles to their publications and then writing books. It is never ending. Even the military is studying the lessons of Iraq formally at their Command and General Staff School: what went wrong, whose fault is it? The scenario is almost beyond the pale--studying how we have screwed up even while the war goes on. It was years after the quagmire of Vietnam before we took a serious look at it. For us old soldiers, we are simply flummoxed.

I feel heartsick for what happens in the theater of battle. Innocents get hurt or maybe the not so innocent, who knows? We report enemy combatants killed in battle, the Iraqis report the same incident as women and children and old people killed. Help! I especially feel sorry for those soldiers attempting to do what they've been trained to do: the Haditha killings are but one example, some charges dismissed, others tried for innocuous crimes such as failure to investigate. Another officer convicted of unauthorized possession of classified documents, conduct unbecoming and then a relationship with an interpreter. And, the often forgotten ones--the families back home, the wives and children whose lives are forever changed and for what!

I recently talked to the father of a former battalion commander who has done two tours in Iraq. The son told him we were making progress but it would take 10 years to even come close to stabilizing Iraq.

All this amidst our kids getting blown up with regularity as the casualty count heads toward 4000. Iraq and all that it encompasses is like a nightmare from which we can't awaken.