The Shame of a Nation: Iraqi and Afghan War Veterans and Suicide

"In fact, the number of U.S. soldiers who have died by their own hand is now estimated to be greater than the number (6,460) who have died in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. Eleven years of war in two operating theaters have taken a severe toll on America’s military. An estimated 2.3 million Americans have served in Iraq or Afghanistan, and 800,000 of those service members have been deployed multiple times."-Anthony Swofford, Newsweek http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/05/20/anthony-swofford-on-the-epidemic-of-military-suicides.html



(photo: A Wounded Warrior Barracks for US Marines at Camp Pendelton in San Diego/ photo, May 2012, from The Daily Beast/Newsweek.)

Shocking report from last year on the tragedy of suicide among American Vets after they return home from Irag and Afghanistan. It s estimated that 18 veterans a day are committing suicide from PTSD and other combat-related diseases. The Veterans Administration and the courts and the public at large--many who do not have a relative or a spouse in this war, unlike previous wars like Vietnam, are not paying enough attention to this tragedy.

"We Meant Well:...Battle For the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People" (2011)

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	History
Author:	Peter Van Buren

Now and then I run across a book that not only enlightens my understanding of some important historical or topical events, but actually seems ot encapsulate all that I have previously read and suspected about a major enterprise.
Peter Van Buren, a State Department Foreign Service Officer for more than two decades in the Far East and, here, in Iraq during the final stages of the official American Occupation of that country. He brings a personal and boarder perspective to the "Catch-22" style chaos and well-intentioned but most often futile and wasteful programs that plagued the Iraqi/American experiment in reinventing a nation from the ground up.

The tales of gross mismanagement, graft, isolation of the VIPs in the heavily-fortified "Green Zone" in central Baghdad ,etc, comes as no surprise to those who have followed development in that nation since the March 2003 invasion. What makes the book worth reading is Mr. Van Buren's eye and ear for the details of life outside the Americanized headquarters in the FOBs (Forward Operations Bases). He spent time in the perilous main cities of Baghdad and Basra during his tour, always in a combat vest on duty outisde his post, always protected by American soldiers and usually getting shot at by persons unknown.

His team's assignment is to create economic vitality in an area that was a combination guerrilla war zone, unforgiving IED course, horrific garbage dump, lakes of greenish water and cesspools NOT served by functioning sewage and water treatment plants, and a collection of sheik-held tribal satraps each looking for easy money.

There are also the private contractors from Kellog, Brown and Root and others who made obscene profits that have served to only make America less safe. Thanks guys.


His knack for adding an ironic and knowing narrative style to the story makes this 261 page book read more like a Graham Greene or Tom Wolfe novel than a true-life report. But a report it is---and a devastation one, I'm afraid.

Here is how the story begins:


"The script for the 2003 invasion did not include an extended
reconstruction effort. It instead imagined Americans being
greeted as liberators like in post- D-day France, with cheerful
natives rushing out to off er our spunky troops bottles of wine
and frisky daughters. The Bush administration ignored the somber
prewar predictions of the State Department, cut it out of
the immediate postwar pro cess, and instead whipped together
a blended family of loyal interns, contractors, and soldiers to
witness the complete implosion of Iraqi civil society. Things
got steadily worse in Iraq as the early Coalition Provisional
Authority and military efforts at reconstruction failed, the UN
was bypassed, and the security situation discouraged even the
hardiest NGOs. By about 2005, the White House saw the need
to kick the war into higher gear, sending in the increased
deployment of troops known as the Surge, while the Pentagon
dusted off the old books from Vietnam for tips on counterinsurgency
philosophy.



"There was originally in the military about
as much enthusiasm for reviving counterinsurgency as there
might have been for reinstating horse- borne cavalry charges and
cutlasses. We were back in a Vietnam kind of war. It wasn’t
enough just to kill people and destroy villages. We had to win
over the ones still alive, get them to adopt a democratic system
and become our allies. Victory would be ours not when we pacifi
ed Iraq militarily but when the country was stable enough to
stand on its own. This was counterinsurgency, hearts and minds,
soft power, what ever you wanted to call it. In the improvisational
spirit of the whole war, it was decided that the State Department
had better get involved in a big way. State would rebuild and
reconstruct Iraq, win over the people with democracy, and then
we could all pack up for home."

Nothing of the sort of course went down that way. Van Buren lays the main blame for this costly mistake not on his Green Zone friends in the Army or the CIA (although some of the gang in those institutions take some criticism). He saves the lion's share on the Bush Administration, their Neo-Con think-tank "generals" in the private sector and the "hawks" in Congress, even though the latter have distanced themselves from the conflict once reality intruded on the dreams of Westernizing Iraq went awry.

Van Buren details his own experiences as a State Department head of something called a Provisional Reconstruction Team (PRC) that engages in a variety of programs that almost always fail due to lack of local input, corruption of local Iraqis, problems of language and culture, inability to properly fund the project, contractors and local leaders skimming money off the top and other debacles and crimes.

The highlight has to be a hospital in southern Iraq that was opened by Laura Bush in 2004 but somehow never managed to receive any patients. Over five billion dollars over five years went into it. Another clinic was opened for the Iraqi people but was left with no roof! Smaller operations set up by the team failed due to the theft of generators (there is no reliable electricity grid in most of the country, power being on a few hours a day in the best of times.)

The one thing that does succeed for Van Buren's team is a a "4-H" agriculture club for children in the town of Mahmudiyah. Whether the club will still be in existence a year after Van Buren helps to set it up the author is not optimistic about.



Part of Peter Van Buren''s blog, which has the same title as the book It's really worth a look:

http://wemeantwell.com/blog/?p=3951

The Walking Wounded: Nearly 40 Percent of Deployed Troops Suffering Mental Illness

(photo by Joe Readle, Getty Images)

This is the face of a young Marine who had just participated in a house-to-house sweep in an Iraqi village.

 

 The toll of boomerang re-deployments for these depleted soldiers and marines aren't just taking their toll in physical maiming (everything to lost limbs to brain trauma caused by powerful remote controlled exploding devices--IEDs-- ), but in the loss of long-term mental stability as well.  New rules that make it impossible to send soldiers back until a year's "rest" from deployment do not address the still lamentable fact that the wars, particularly in Afghanistan, appear to be nowhere near ending and this country is relying on National Guard and Reservists troops in numbers that have not been seen in the Armed Forces since World War II.     

Although it has been nearly three years since the first major findings came out recording high combat stress-related  disorders plaguing American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, things seem to have only got worse. Recent studies by the Department of Veterans Affairs show that of the 289,328 veterans returning from combat across the globe, 37 percent are suffering from either clinical depression or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  Alcoholism, violence (including suicide and homicide) are a record levels.  In just one Army unit, based in Fort Collins, Colorado, over eleven homicides have been carried out by returning soldiers who saw intense fighting in Iraq.)  And yet, despite, the studies, according to Daniel Swerdling of National Public Radio, the psychiatric staff  at Army Medical facilities stateside are still under-funded and under staffed.       

This is a report on the Fort Carson incidents from the pro-Veteran site, VetsVoice (not affiliated with the Department of Defense):   

"Soldiers from a Colorado unit accused in nearly a dozen slayings since returning home - including a couple gunned down as they put up a garage sale sign - could be showing hostility fueled by intense combat in Iraq, where the troops suffered heavy losses and told of witnessing war crimes, the military said Wednesday.

In what was billed as its most comprehensive study to date of violent crimes and combat exposure, the Army looked at soldiers from the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division - nicknamed the Lethal Warriors - who were accused in a spate of five killings around Colorado Springs, home to Fort Carson, in 2007 and 2008.

Six other slayings involving unit soldiers occurred in Colorado and other states since 2005

We've been hearing about a number of incidents, that is by 'we' those who use multiple mostly online sources and either accidentally find them or use the right search words. The MSM is virtually silent except when one or two who get it are brave enough to fight to get the reports aired!!

Army investigators compared the Fort Carson unit of about 3,700 soldiers with a similarly sized unit and found it suffered more combat deaths in Iraq and was deployed there longer.

"This deployment experienced higher levels of combat intensity," the report said, adding that the soldiers also faced "significant disruptions in family-social support."

Lt. Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker, the Army's surgeon general, said Wednesday the unit's crime cluster appeared to be unique among Army bases and that its combat exposure and length of deployments are just two factor officials are looking at.

"We're starting to look into the deployments and ... how it's related with attitudes and behavior," Schoomaker said.......Rest Here

Soldiers returning need not only more down time, between deployments, they should be serving one if any at all. They need time between deployments! They need the help they seek! They need to be understood when seeking that help!"

http://vetvoice.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=5B3AB9B85FAC165E2D62DE46FD95E048?diaryId=2955

It is clear that, in the course of American military history, to paraphrase a famous statesman of the past: Never has so much been demanded of so few, over and over again.   I wonder how long the Afghan War would last if the leaders in Washington came out for a draft of men to fight the war.  The very unpopularity of such an idea--among rank and file members of both parties--calls into question the very need for this war.  And with troops strength recently doubled to 80,000 Americans in  Afghanistan, and little continued support for this war outside America, this policy seems to be designed to continue to produce violence not only abroad but pain and suffering for families and their loved ones on the home front.     

 

 

 

"Peace In Our Time" Part Two--The Munich Pact Mind-Set and the Iraq War

Here's quick refresher on the events of  the Czech Crisis of 1938.  Historians today usually see it as appeasement of a mad dictator, or Chamberlain and France's  Daladier buying time against the Third Reich at Czech expense  to build up their defenses against the "gathering storm".   Some see Neville Chamberlain's motives as a pathetic attempt to align Britain with Hitler's regime to stem the tide of Stalin-style Communism.  What ever the case, these events are a key I believe to understanding the course of war and "brinkmanship" for American foreign policy after World War II.  It led to NATO in 1948--a good idea, I think--but also to CIA-backed  overthrows of governments  in Iran and Guatemala in the 1953 and 1954, respectively, and, most disastrously, our long and bloody hot war in Indo-China.

We could go into multiple CIA operations in Castro's Cuba (in an unholy alliance with elements of the American Mafia) , Chile (the overthrow of the elected President Allende in 1973) and all over Latin America through the training provided to ultra-violent and torture happy Latin American military forces--some of whom headed death squads.  This was done in the 1960's thru the 80's by the School of the Americas in the Panamanian Canal Zone. Here is some material on the Panama  training center through a 1999 PBS News Hour segment:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/july-dec99/sotamericas_9-21.html 

 Critics called this school "The School of the 'Golpes' (Coup de tas) " because the graduates frequently went back to El Salvador and Guatemala and Uruguay, et al, and had no trouble killing social democrats, liberals, nuns or any other group of people who somehow seemed a threat to their designs.    

Anyway, here is the clip, taken from Frank Capra's 1942 "Why We Fight" documentary, a propaganda series to provide American soldiers and sailors with an overview of  what they were engaged in:

    

The "Negotiation Equals Appeasement" formula was adopted for a long time by Cold War conservatives (and Kennedy-Johnson Democratic hawks  like Walt Rostow, MacGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara.)   It abated for a while after the Fall of Saigon but came back into vogue during the Reagan Era and the heat was turned up against the tiny nations of Nicaragua and Grenada, starting one brief war and almost triggering another direct war against the Sandinista government.   (It was American sponsorship of the Somoza dictatorship that helped bring the Sandinistas to power and America befriended the Contra forces which resulted in their being financed by the arms-for-hostages Iran Contra Scandal and the likely drug trafficking of CIA-sponsored groups bringing cocaine into American cities like Los Angeles in the form of "crack".)

That program against the people of  Nicaragua and El Salvador was sold under the banner of Munich Redux--we can't negotiate with them because they aren't Nicaraguans tired of American-backed dictators, they are just puppets of Moscow and Havana.  So much for nuance in foreign policy.  

  This underhanded program was halted by the glare of publicity by Congressional Investigations in 1986-7 (remember Lt. Colonel Oliver North, who lied to Congress, was freed from jail time on a technicality, and is now a Fox News Celebrity?) The Sandinistas eventually fell of their own weight, as did the Soviet Empire under Mikhail Gorbachev reform programs.  Some die-hard conservatives despised even Reagan himself for meeting with "Gorby" in bilateral summits in late 1980's.   This was not the "Winston Churchill 1940" game-plan they wanted---where all relations between opposing major powers have to be entered into either war or full surrender of one side or the other. Many Americans over-learned the lessons of the Munich Pact.  The attacks of 9/11 gave us a renewed sense of fighting a foe who could not be negotiated with.  The Bush Administration took advantage of this group-think and George W, Bush went after Saddam Hussein, his father's 'bete noire" with trumped up tales of weapons of mass destruction and ties to the fanatics in Osama Bin Ladin's al-Queda.  

Here is the sad tale of this latest quagmire, told from the perspective of  Media Critic and former ABC newsman Danny Schectner in the 2004 documentary  "Weapons of Mass Deception".  It is available on DVD and is worth seeing even today for a primer on how we got into the war and how the mainstream media--not just FOX--went along for the ride--literally.  

  

In Honor of Memorial Day and the fallen

This is one of many photographs that the current Administration prefer are not shown, supposably for "the privacy of families."  But I think all of us over the age of 11 know the real reason why President Bush would rather not have the public see such images. He wants us to think of the war as an abstraction.  Yet those who have friends and family on active duty in Afghanistan and Iraq don't have the luxury of such a remote and half-forgotten memory of the events playing out in the Middle East.   

Here is a website where you can see the faces of those brave men and women who have given what Lincoln called  "the last full measure of devotion to their country". 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18338428/nPage/1

Torture is Not American

Retired General Barry McCaffrey spoke out on the PRI Show "Here and Now" yesterday and forcefully expressed his disapproval of reports of captured suspects in the war on terror being repeatedly subjected to torture. Even though in the past such abominations have taken place in other wars--notably just off the battlefield by lower-ranks of individual, the government prosecuted those Americans who did terrorize and humiliate and attack chained up prisoners. (And continued to prosecute them in the wake of the scandals at Abu Gahib prison in Iraq in 2003-04).

But now it appears certain practices of torture are a normal bureaucratic procedure by CIA flying squads or military intelligence units: they include prolonged slapping upside the head of detainees , waterboarding (simulated drowning), subjecting detainees to freezing temperatures in special cold cells and chained to the floor in cells to sit in their own filth.

And all the while,despite the reports of special CIA "black sites" in Eastern Europe and the rendition policy of deporting nationals from Germany and Canada to other "friendly" nations in the Middle East which practice torture, the Bush Administration says we do not torture captured suspects or "enemy combatants". But it is clear from the hearings in Congress involving former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and others who have contradicted the former AG's testimony, that the Executive Branch has been doing just that. Gonzalez leaked "torture memo" and other documents reported in the New York Times and other media make it clear our government has crossed a line that American intelligence officers didn't cross even when dealing with the Nazi big shots in secret intelligence camps in World War II.

"It's like a grade-B Nazi movie," McCaffrey said, referring to the policies that include torture and spying on Americans without any judicial oversight.

McCaffrey is not a "Ivory Tower" academic, although he now teaches at West Point and is a on-air military consultant at NBC News. He was in Vietnam as a combat officer and went through part of Robert McNamara's meat-grinder during that long war. He also has a son currently serving as a combat combat either in Iraq or Afghanistan (he, understandably doesn't say which country his son is in. )

McCaffrey strikes me as a guy who knows a quagmire when he sees it and stated his case well against a major long-term US troop presence in Iraq both on the radio program and in the article below:

http://www.projo.com/news/content/mcCaffrey_Iraq_10-10-07_4H7EBFO.339afcc.html

It's interesting that it took a GOP stalwart like John McCain, the only presidential candidate who was tortured (as a POW in Hanoi), to get a law through Congress banning the sort of barbarity Mr Gonzales tried to rationalize. Prez Bush signed the bill, but I wonder given recent reports if the White House is actually living up to the law.

"3:10 to Baghdad"

In a recent movie release, "3:10 to Yuma", the plot presented is that Ben Wade, a savvy and ruthless criminal of the Old West, is captured by a posse. An ex-Union Army soldier and failing farmer in the posse tries to turn him over to a special train that will take him to a certain hanging for his bloody, anarchic misdeeds. Complications ensue.

Reading the plot of this upcoming Horse Opera reminds me of the situation American policy makers have on their hands in Iraq. It one thing to capture a dangerous entity, like a wanted killer (or a failed nation-state torn by ethnic, intra-religious, and crinimal gangs) and another to finish up the job and get the Desperado (or war-torn country) on the train and off the hands of the overtaxed forces trying to be let loose of its dangerous assignment.

Call me just another "left wing Kool Aid drinker", but I think this game of good news--bad news in Iraq with the Bush Administration and the fawning media pundits on the editorial Right of the American Political Spectrum is getting old. O nthe one hand, we hear, "progress is being made" in one central province like Anbar and then on other reports we read that of course the government is corrupt and the military is unreliable and the prime minister is ineffectual and of course we can't expect to leave and our freedom is at stake and so on and so on. It would "embolden the terrorists if we leave" anytime before...whenever...so we have to keep rotating the same men and women back inthere and finish the job and we don't need a draft or anything but things are desperate and al-Queda is on the march and yada-yada-yada.

Does any of this sound inconsistent to you? You are not alone, my friends.

First off we are all supposed to be impressed by the fact that the President just made another secret trip to Iraq, this time to Anbar Province, a focus of the recent "Surge" of Yank forces. Now its been four years since the American Forces went into liberate Baghdad and if things we're actually improving by now, as the neo-Conservatives assured us they would back in 2003-4, wouldn't it be possible to have a scheduled visit by Bush or a major cabinet officer to at least some location in Iraq?

Indeed whenever you hear about a Congressman or a tv hotshot like Katie Couric going outside the Green Zone in Baghdad or Fallujah, he or she is invariably being guarded from all sides by a platoon or two of Marines, and maybe some Apache helicoptors hovering overhead. Plus all the high-priced private outfits that hire ex-Special Forces types to guard the other American VIP's. Such progress!!

One would imagine it would have been easier to stroll casually through the rough end of Tombstone, Arizona back on that morning 125 years ago at the OK Corral (when the Clanton Gang and the Earps were firing lead at one another) than to even look like a Westerner on the streets of most Iraqi cities. A couple million Iraqis have fled the country and Syria--the only country that has let them in legally is going to seal the border in four months. This is "Mission Accomplished"?

One New York Republican Congressman on CNN's Wolf Blitzer news show last week mentioned three times how safe it was to travel around some market in Falujah. Mr. Blitzer finally got him to admit he was surrounded by Marines when he took his little "stroll" around the marketplace.

The fact is that there is a Civil War going on in Baghdad and the Sunni population is losing ground to the larger, Iranian-backed Shittes. Anbar is a Sunni Area and thousands of Sunni tribal warlords are currently more amenable to driving out pockets of Al-Queda fighters, the better to get more guns from the Americans so when they finish killing some qouta of foreign fighters, they can get back to the business of shooting it out with their sectarian countrymen.

Secondly, while things are reportedly going better in Anbar, the military brass went up on Capitol Hill yesterday and said yet again that there is still not near enough functioning Iraqi Army units that can operate on their own. I predict they never will be ready as long as there are Americans there to fight for them. Ditto the Iraq-based politicans will never strike bargains over serious "benchmarks" like oil revenue and power sharing as long as we are there to spill blood for their internecine arguments.

The President has said he will not be swayed by polls or public opinion. But even in a modern high-tech national security republic headed by elite and cocooned leaders, there comes a time when the will of the majority still will be heard:

Fifteen more months and there's another general election.

If Bush and the Congress, both highly unpopular and both claiming mandates from past elections, can't figure out that the majority of Americans are sick of this war and want to start the business of serious disengagment in Iraq, maybe the voters can show them a clearer sign.

To take a page from another Western, "High Noon", our military, like Gary Cooper's beleagurerd sheriff, has done enough law and order work for an ungrateful and nonsupportive citizenry. The time to drop the badge and let those townsfolk themselves do some cleaning up is sooner rather than far down the road.

Now THAT'S a Really Bad Idea!

Tommy Thompson Governor of Wisconsin announced he is a candidate for President in 2008. One of his major foreign policy ideas concerns the Iraq War.

Here's Governor Tommy's Big Plan, courtesy of the LA Times :

-- He would have "a completely different Iraq strategy" from the president's. Thompson said he would "demand" that the Iraqi government vote as to whether it wanted the U.S. to remain in the country. If the answer were yes, "it immediately gives a degree of legitimacy." If the answer were no, "We would get out, absolutely. It's a duly elected government."

************

Great, Tommy. You'd let the Iraqi folks vote, assuming they could get to the polling places these days--and our forces will just keep sending people over there to bleed and get maimed and drive around being blown up in their Humvees until 51 percent of Iraqis who get to the polls without being blown up themselves say it's okay for us to leave.

Bullocks!

Our President and the Congressional majority in Congress can't agree on the course of this war, which has already taken away and mutilated too many good men and women in my humble and non-expert opinion...so Gov. Cheesehead would have the Arabs and Kurds decide if and when we stay or begin to pull out ground troops.

I say rather let's debate and decide that critical matter in THIS country, the United States of America (please see a World Atlas or Google the place if you're not sure if you live there.) When and how we surge or withdraw troops and in what number is not up for a plebisite in Anbar Province. Those in military service are OUR people; they don't belong to the whims of Prime Minister Malaiki or those other hunkered-down and uncompromising tribal and religious power brokers in Mesopotemia. The "liberated" Iraqis haven't even really begun to deal with the problems of oil revenue and power-sharing even though they have been free of Saddam for four years! Their old feuds will someday--soon I hope--belong to them alone.

Bad idea. But thanks for the suggestion, Tommy.

A Corner Finally Turned?

It appears we might just be at the beginning of a needed change from the "Too Proud To Talk" strategy the Bush State Department has had with Iran and Syria.

Check out the latest here: says

There may be a very long way to go here but apparently folks in the White House have decided to stop imagining the November elections were an affirmation of the current Iraq policy and are willing to explore long-term solutions besides sporadic "surges" of our overextended military.

The US out of Iraq--if not now, then not for too long either

Peter Beinart of the New Republic captures the sense of a terrible impasse that pervades my own thought pattern when I try to figure out what steps that players on Team Bush and the new and diverse Democratic players in the Senate and House should do to support or hector the White House.

Beinart writes:

"In a particularly cruel twist, the events of recent months have demolished the best arguments both for staying and for leaving. Once upon a time, you could have plausibly argued that, by staying, the United States might make things better: We could have improved security on the ground and thus enhanced the Iraqi government's authority while weakening the insurgents and the militias. That would have allowed Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish leaders to make the tough political compromises that might have pulled Iraq back from the brink. But, since February's attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra, the violence has grown so shocking--and the sectarian hatred so intense--that asking either the Sunnis or Shia to disarm (no one is even asking the Kurds) is inviting them to commit mass suicide. The Bush administration keeps telling Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki to take on the Shia militias, as if the guy just lacks motivation. But the militias are not a threat to the Iraqi state; they are the Iraqi state. By their grace, Maliki stays in office and remains alive."

I'm guessing from the results and analysis of the 2006 elections that the majority of the ever-expanding independent voters chose Democratic candida tees not because said voters support immediate or even rapid withdrawal of forces. But where trying, perhaps, to widen the options the country might have to remove our soldiers and Marines from the quagmire--to end this open-ended "We will be with you always, unto the end..." flavor of the mission.

These independents, these quasi-GOP, quasi-Democrats, depending on the state of the union-- may have voted simply for SOMEBODY to come up with a Iraq War paradigm that will stop the situation from continuing to grow more dire, to get the Iraqis to stand up for themselves and create order with fewer and fewer Americans carrying the load, to present options other than, say , what Senator McCain proposes in his" stay 'til hell-freezes-over strategy" or pull out altogether in a rigid timetable, as some Democrats have advanced.

They want something in-between. Or at least these voters hope for it.

Hope. It's something Joe Klein in his recent book "Politics Lost" says every successful presidential candidate has used in some form to win the White House. Carter wins in 1976 because he tells people our government can be as good as its people. Reagan wins in 1980 and 1984 because of "The Speech", a twenty minute vision of America with its best days ahead of it; Clinton wins in 1992 part because he "comes from a place called Hope". Of course that leaves out a lot of pandering to the middle-class and promises to end all sorts of problems with the vaguest of details, but you need the Hope message.

The premise of "hope above all" is that America is populated by an essentially optimistic people who in the final analysis want to feel not only safe from terrorists and bad guys, but also that, somehow, we make a difference for good in an area we send men and women to die for. Most Americans I suspect don't want us to stay forever in a foreign country grinding up our volunteer soldiers. We've made mistakes in Iraq, but, in the final analysis, its their country. We're not the British Raj and this is 2006, not 1906.

My particular "hope" right now is not something I can produce great detail on. The more I look into Iraq, the less likely a radical change seems possible. You have the chaos of civil war on the ground, the terrorist threat that clouds everything, and, like Vietnam, the personal honor of very personable and powerful men--well, mostly men--in D.C. to consider.

I do think we should draw down our troops in some sort of step-by-step approach over a matter of say, eighteen months, and downplay this Neo-Con/Neo- Wilsonian idea of bringing democracy to a part of the world that's too far from Europe, North American and East Asia (where moderate republics exist in the main). Above all, we have to let the Iraqis have their country back, for better or worse. I don't think sending more troops or waiting ten years is going to make the leaving any less of a risk.

Our young men and women who have volunteered to defend this country are owed a better chance of survival than to ask them to somehow give us a Middle East free of risks.