Entries tagged with “Iraq war” from Reality Window

Check this video out.

Puts a slightly different light on energy consumption and supporting the troops. Don't think I realized that there was quite such a direct connection before.

You know what to do.

There is nothing like the power of writing by someone who experienced war first-hand. There's a female Iraq war vet who lives in MN and is dealing with a horrendous case of PTSD, hallucinations, the whole bit, as well as physical injuries. Ginmar's writing is powerful, from-the-gut truth that breaks away a bit of the shell of the ordinary that surrounds our daily lives and puts her readers in a different place.

I first read her writing in the diary: But aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

It introduces a bit of her story as a female vet with severe PTSD and how the VA, at least her particular VA center, hasn't yet figured out how to deal with the concept that there are no front-lines / behind-the-lines roles in modern warfare. That any deployed soldier, whether part of a supply unit or a combat unit, is in combat and female soldiers should not be lumped in with soldiers' wives for group therapy sessions.

Yesterday ginmar posted a diary about how people use the phrase, Thank you for your service. Makes you rethink what and how you respond to soldiers whose service you want to acknowledge.

In a comment in that one, she mentioned that she was going to post about how the hallucinations were becoming so severe that she was having difficulty writing and she did so today. It's called Riding the Nightmare and it's extraordinary.

There's an excerpt in the middle written by her CO in response to some comments by some supposed vets and conservative military types about her unit and what they did in Iraq. Per the CO, they did routes in Iraq that the Marines wouldn't do with 3-4 unarmored vehicles and no armored escort.

I'm not excerpting because it wouldn't do her writing justice. Start with any of the posts though the last one may make more sense if you read them in chronological order.

Go learn about what our female soldiers did and still do and how we, as a country, and the VA, specifically, fail to acknowledge what they did and to support them fully from someone who's in the midst of dealing with it.

Here is a tour de force post on the current state of the body armor given to our troops. That's a topic that I wrote about in 2006 on the johnkerry.com blog. Unbelievably our military is still losing their lives because of the greed that suffuses the military-industrial complex and its long penetrating fingers of control in the Pentagon's acquisition process.

Go read.

(This morning's essay on re-entry comes to us courtesy of VeteransForPeace.org...)

To the Captain I Saw at Cracker Barrel

by Richard R. DiPirro, VFP member

Welcome home. Welcome back, sir, and welcome home.

Welcome back to the world you once knew, which looks entirely different to you now, which resembles the world you lived in before but seems drawn like a cartoon now and scored with music you've never heard. Welcome back to a civilization you couldn't wait to get back to, but isn't what you remember at all.

There are people smiling and shaking your hand and slapping your back -- actors in a bad play about the life of someone who looks a lot like you. There are signs and banners and parades and picnics and they whirl around you. You are an observer at the center of everyone's attention.

"Support the Troops!" They yell until they're hoarse -- waving flags and driving cars with yellow magnets, never trying to explain why they weren't with you there, suffering 130 degree heat, shaking scorpions from their boots and feeling the weight of sand settle in their lungs. Welcome home, sir.

I saw you at Cracker Barrel the other morning, sir. I sat and ate my Old Timer's Breakfast and laughed with my wife and forgot about my brothers and sisters living every moment of thirteen months in their own hot hell. I would have missed you if I hadn't looked up when I did from my hash browns and turkey sausage, would have missed that moment I'll never forget.

I saw your boots first, sir and the brown and tan of your desert camouflage and then your face -- a face I knew like my mothers, like my own. You scanned everyone as you walked through the restaurant toward your table, scanned their faces, evaluated their threat potential and moved on to the next.

(This morning's essay on re-entry comes to us courtesy of VeteransForPeace.org...)

To the Captain I Saw at Cracker Barrel

by Richard R. DiPirro, VFP member

Welcome home. Welcome back, sir, and welcome home.

Welcome back to the world you once knew, which looks entirely different to you now, which resembles the world you lived in before but seems drawn like a cartoon now and scored with music you've never heard. Welcome back to a civilization you couldn't wait to get back to, but isn't what you remember at all.

There are people smiling and shaking your hand and slapping your back -- actors in a bad play about the life of someone who looks a lot like you. There are signs and banners and parades and picnics and they whirl around you. You are an observer at the center of everyone's attention.

"Support the Troops!" They yell until they're hoarse -- waving flags and driving cars with yellow magnets, never trying to explain why they weren't with you there, suffering 130 degree heat, shaking scorpions from their boots and feeling the weight of sand settle in their lungs. Welcome home, sir.

I saw you at Cracker Barrel the other morning, sir. I sat and ate my Old Timer's Breakfast and laughed with my wife and forgot about my brothers and sisters living every moment of thirteen months in their own hot hell. I would have missed you if I hadn't looked up when I did from my hash browns and turkey sausage, would have missed that moment I'll never forget.

I saw your boots first, sir and the brown and tan of your desert camouflage and then your face -- a face I knew like my mothers, like my own. You scanned everyone as you walked through the restaurant toward your table, scanned their faces, evaluated their threat potential and moved on to the next.

As the New York Times pointed out today in a top-page article titled Deadly U.S. Milestone in Afghan War, on July 22 of this year the 500th U.S. troop fatality was recorded in Afghanistan, the home of the Forgotten -- some would say the Abandoned -- War against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

With that in mind, it seemed like this would be particularly appropriate timing for me to repost my OP from last summer again -- in part, to remind us all that the less things change, the more they stay insane.

Erie, Pennsylvania is a small city on the edge of a great lake. It is a quintessentially American community -- so much so, in fact, that it was designated an All-American City by Richard Nixon in 1972. Like many such cities, it has gone through some painful changes over the last few decades as its old industrial economy gradually gave way to a 21st-century technology/service/tourism economy instead. But Erie still typifies what most Americans look for in their home towns: wide streets, good schools, low crime rates, affordable housing, and a generally pleasant quality of life for its citizens.

And like the residents of most American home towns outside the Beltway and between the polarized left and right coast megalopolises, people in Erie are basically centrist by nature. They may differ widely on specific individual issues, but for the most part they share common values and common beliefs with each other and with the hundreds of millions of other Americans who live in what is sometimes referred to as "flyover country."

Politics is something that people do care about in Erie, at least when it impacts their daily lives in some particular way, but they don't obsess about it. They may lean left or right, but they do so with their feet planted firmly in the middle of the road. During the 2004 race, George Bush's single largest campaign-rally audience was in Erie. But in 2004, Erie voters chose John Kerry over George Bush by a solid margin. Professional pundits and politicians and prognosticators do well to pay attention to what happens in Erie, because it is and always has been a bellwether burg for how the American electorate looks at the world.

That's why today, while Pentagon officials pander to politicians and pundits pontificate about how important it is to give the imperialist warmongers in the White House more time to prove their ill-conceived surge is working in Iraq, it's appropriate for us to look at the human costs of making war as seen through the eyes of quintessentially average Americans, as told in the words of four reporters for the award-winning Erie Times-News newspaper and website.

Two funerals in two weeks. Two flag-draped coffins. Two men who gave the last full measure of devotion for the country they chose to serve. And one mother of two sons in harm's way, waiting and hoping and praying that they come home alive this time.

As Times-News reporter Erica Erwin wrote on July 4,

Alan Sargent stood on the tarmac at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport and placed his hand over his heart.

Fifteen yards away, Northwest Airlines Flight 1740 had rolled to a stop outside gate C6.

Sargent watched, waiting, while members of the ground crew crawled through the plane's belly into the cargo hold.

Minutes passed before he saw the flag-draped coffin pass from the hold onto a conveyor belt.

"There he is," Sargent said to himself. "There he is."

[ ... ]

Travelers walking through the C terminal at Cleveland Hopkins paused, pressing their faces against the window panes as a military honor guard marched in lock step to the plane and carried the coffin to a waiting hearse.

Passengers, asked to stay onboard, watched from their seats above.

A baggage handler dressed in shorts and a fluorescent green vest joined police, fire and airport officials in saluting as the coffin passed by.

By now, if you read the blogosphere or merely listen to the talking heads on TV, you know that al Maliki said that he agreed with Obama's plans for Iraq including a withdrawal in a Der Spiegel interview. There has been some discussion that the interview didn't really say that but now the NY Times has put that story to rest. They acquired the original interview from Der Spiegel and have translated it.

But the interpreter for the interview works for Mr. Maliki's office, not the magazine. And in an audio recording of Mr. Maliki's interview that Der Spiegel provided to The New York Times, Mr. Maliki seemed to state a clear affinity for Mr. Obama's position, bringing it up on his own in an answer to a general question on troop presence.

The following is a direct translation from the Arabic of Mr. Maliki's comments by The Times: "Obama's remarks that -- if he takes office -- in 16 months he would withdraw the forces, we think that this period could increase or decrease a little, but that it could be suitable to end the presence of the forces in Iraq."

He continued: "Who wants to exit in a quicker way has a better assessment of the situation in Iraq."

Mr. Maliki's top political adviser, Sadiq al-Rikabi, declined to comment on the remarks, but spoke in general about the Iraqi position on Sunday. Part of that position, he said, comes from domestic political pressure to withdraw.

"Foreign soldiers in the middle of the most populated areas are not without their side effects," he said. "Shouldn't we look to an end for this unhealthy situation?"

Look for Bush McCain to play catch-up this week.

Good point by Daniel Larison on the surge:

The point isn't that Baghdad has not become a multifaith enclave, but that it used to be something like that and was then turned into a highly segregated and divided city thanks to the mix of invasion, insecurity and sectarian-cum-democratic politics. Hence, the nightmarish violence of 2006 has subsided into merely horrible because most of the potential victims of new sectarian violence have been pushed into new parts of the country, fled to Syria and Jordan or elsewhere or were killed in the first waves. And this is dubbed success.

This was the point Klein was making here - the causes of reduced violence are many and some have nothing to do with the additional brigades, and some are the after-effects of the magnificent failure of the occupation to fulfill its obligations to secure the population of the country it ostensibly controlled. Meanwhile, "surge" defenders would very much like to credit the change in tactics with most or all of the improvements, and then allow this reduction in violence to make it seem as if something fundamental had changed about a society in which armed gangs were butchering civilians just a year and a half ago for happening to be in the wrong district. That is what I call an unpersuasive case.

The end results of sectarian ethnic cleansing in Baghdad neighborhoods, Muqtada al-Sadr's unilateral ceasefire and the Sunni chieftains' alliance against al Qaeda in Iraq are the prime factors in the somewhat reduced level of violence in Iraq. The surge in and of itself had very little to do with causing the reduction.

That said, Petreus's philosophy on how to work as an occupying force with the Iraqis should have been implemented far earlier in our occupation than it was. Had it been implemented earlier as opposed to the policies that produced Abu Ghraib, the discussions we're having today would probably be quite different.

H/T to Sully

The state of our media in the US is perilous for our democracy and this story, "Reporters Say Networks Put Wars on Back Burner", from the New York Times illustrates it most clearly. Via KerryVision at noon on 6-23-2008, the counters reflected the US's commitment to Iraq. But you'd never know it by the coverage in our television media.

According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been "massively scaled back this year." Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007. The "CBS Evening News" has devoted the fewest minutes to Iraq, 51, versus 55 minutes on ABC's "World News" and 74 minutes on "NBC Nightly News." (The average evening newscast is 22 minutes long.)

CBS News no longer stations a single full-time correspondent in Iraq, where some 150,000 United States troops are deployed.

The Times reporter opens his article with a quote from Lara Logan's appearance on The Daily Show. You can tell that her appearance was probably the inspiration for the article. She did not hold back.

More soldiers died in Afghanistan last month than in Iraq. Who's paying attention to that? 33,000 - highest troop level since the war began - seven years after we defeated the Taliban.

Her whole appearance is riveting -- do watch it.

Sully has posted the email of a marine who wrote to him about his Disgrace and Disgrace Ctd. posts. It's gritty but it underscores once again that torture does not provide useful information.

Andrew Sullivan has two posts, Disgrace and Disgrace Ctd., that I wanted to highlight for the manner in which he addresses neocon arguments concerning torture and the treatment of detainees. I was first drawn to Sully's blog because of his stand on torture and his championing of Captain Ian Fishback. He has lost none of his passion in writing about this topic.

From Disgrace:

Pete talks about a moral disgrace. You know what is a moral disgrace? Conflating innocent people with those who "want to slit the throats and watch innocent Americans bleed and die." Here's also what is a disgrace: that an American administration knowingly seized individuals who were innocent of any crime, tortured and abused hundreds of them, and lied about it. That Dick Cheney and George W. Bush decided in advance to bypass the Congress in setting clear, legal, constitutional rules for the handling of detainees in the war on terror and so ended up in the Gitmo mess. That, in a time of war and great peril, Bush and Cheney decided to go on an executive branch power-grab because they knew full well that what they intended to do - torture their way to "intelligence" - was illegal. That the Bush policy has neither brought anyone to justice nor provided a decent alternative to habeas rights and poisoned the reputation of American justice for a generation around the world. That the United States coopted former Soviet prison camps in Eastern Europe in order to perpetrate Gestapo methods of interrogation. That's a disgrace.

In Disgrace Ctd., he goes on:

Pete concedes that the administration originally seized far, far more detainees than it could prove guilty (or ever tried to prove guilty) and has released thousands falsely imprisoned. Of the thousands seized, Pete concedes many were abused and tortured, with over a hundred deaths occurring during interrogation, two score of whom the administration has itself conceded were murder-by-interrogation. All this occurred after the president decided his actions as commander-in-chief could not be constrained by the law, after he had waived the baseline Geneva Convention protections for prisoners in wartime - in violation of the policy of every previous president of the United States from Washington on - and after critical memos were signed allowing American interrogators to do anything to prisoners short of death or loss of a major organ. [...]

And all this was done not in the chaos of a battlefield or even by rogue units or POW camps. It was not done in a war with anything like as many soldiers and battles as World War II. It was done in a closely managed war by a professional military and intelligence service in every theater of combat as a concerted policy to get more intelligence about Jihadist terror and the Iraq insurgency. It was authorized directly in the chain of command by the president, who knowingly broke the law and hired lawyers to tell him he hadn't. No clever argumentation that "only" 270 prisoners remain at Gitmo can gainsay that. And it is not, by the way, evidence against the fact that this administration seized countless innocents and tortured them to say that they eventually released most of them. It is no consolation to the torture victims at Abu Ghraib that they were eventually set free and their innocence confirmed. Those are the standards of benign dictatorships, not democracies.

Now, you could argue that the administration, after initial understandable over-reach, has tried to set things right. But you would be wrong. [...]

Major Gen Antonio Taguba, trusted enough by this administration to run an earlier report on the abuse scandal, puts it plainly enough:

"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

The Bush - Cheney administration has much to answer for. The question remains in what court or venue will they be held accountable?

Another retired general steps forward to tell us just how the Bush administration screwed us over and in the process, screwed over our military forces as well. From Time magazine via Andrew Sullivan:

Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. Forces in Iraq in 2003-2004, has written a new memoir, Wiser in Battle: A Soldier's Story, an account of his life and his service in Iraq. Sanchez was a three-star general -- and the military's senior Hispanic officer -- when he led U.S. forces in the first year of the war. He was relieved of his command by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2004 following the revelations of the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. In 2005, Marine General Peter Pace, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called him to say his career was over and he wouldn't get the promotion to a full general -- four stars -- that Sanchez says he was promised. Six months later, at Rumsfeld's request, he showed up at the Pentagon for a meeting with the defense secretary shortly before retiring. In this exclusive excerpt, Sanchez details what happened next:

I walked into Rumsfeld's office at 1:25 p.m. on April 19, 2006. He had just returned from a meeting at the White House, and the only other person present in the room was his new Chief of Staff, John Rangel.

"Ric, it's been a long time," Rumsfeld said, greeting me in a friendly manner. "I'm really sorry that your promotion didn't work out. We just couldn't make it work politically. Sending a nomination to the Senate would not be good for you, the Army, or the department."

"I understand, sir," I replied.

Then we walked over to his small conference table. "Have a seat," he said. "Now, Ric, what are your timelines?"

"Well, sir, my transition leave will start in September with retirement the first week of November."

[...]

Secretary Rumsfeld then pulled out a two-page memo and handed it to me. "I wrote this after a promotion interview about two weeks ago," he explained. "The officer told me that one of the biggest mistakes we made after the war was to allow CENTCOM and CFLCC to leave the Iraq theater immediately after the fighting stopped -- and that left you and V Corps with the entire mission."

"Yes, that's right," I said.

"Well, how could we have done that?" he said in an agitated, but adamant, tone. "I knew nothing about it. Now, I'd like you to read this memo and give me any corrections."

In the memo, Rumsfeld stated that one of the biggest strategic mistakes of the war was ordering the major redeployment of forces and allowing the departure of the CENTCOM and CFLCC staffs in May - June 2003.

"This left General Sanchez in charge of operations in Iraq with a staff that had been focused at the operational and tactical level, but was not trained to operate at the strategic/operational level." He went on to write that neither he nor anyone higher in the Administration knew these orders had been issued, and that he was dumbfounded when he learned that Gen. McKiernan was out of the country and in Kuwait, and that the forces would be drawn down to a level of about 30,000 by September. "I did not know that Sanchez was in charge," he wrote.

I stopped reading after I read that last statement, because I knew it was total BS. After a deep breath, I said, "Well, Mr. Secretary, the problem as you've stated it is generally accurate, but your memo does not accurately capture the magnitude of the problem. Furthermore, I just can't believe you didn't know that Franks's and McKiernan's staffs had pulled out and that the orders had been issued to redeploy the forces."

From lao hong han, Don't Turn Your Eyes Away, Dammit!

I understand why, even as this sucking chest wound of an occupation enters its sixth year, there have been relatively few diaries here dealing with it. It's a drag to contemplate, and it's hard to figure out what to do about it. It's easier to write about the Democratic primary campaign and the dangers of McCain. It's easier to assume that Clinton or Obama will move to pull the troops out in a year or so.

Nonetheless, I ask that you give me about four minutes to watch a short video from Baghdad, just produced by The Guardian and ITV News.

Sucks, doesn't it?

Our President, our government, our military created this awful wasteland. They are enabling it, even as you read, pumping money and weapons to the perpetrators of these massacres.

And you know what?

It is not enough to be appalled or to denounce Bush. The grieving families in that Baghdad park-turned-cemetery do not need our sympathy or our solace. They need us to act to end this unjust and unjustifiable occupation.

Atrios highlighted this one:

Whatever one thinks about Obama generally, this notion that opposing the Iraq war back when it was the most awesome war ever wasn't a big deal really pisses me off. It was a big deal, and I'm tired of the few courageous people such as Bob Graham who did oppose it getting written out of the script. Those were crazy days, and the "crazies" who stepped way out on that limb to yell "stop" deserve our praise and admiration for it.

The entire anti-war movement hasn't just been marginalized, it's been largely erased from our political narrative. It existed. It marched. It gave speeches. And some even cast their votes in Congress.

This is part of a discussion I had with a Hillary supporter earlier:

...she supported it without looking at the NIE file, yes, that she did do.

And people are right to talk about that.

To the extent that she supported it, she's complicit.

At the same time that she was saying that, Obama was running for office in Illinois.  In a time-period where the pressure to "be patriotic" was tremendous, he had the guts and the judgment to say:

I don't oppose all wars.

And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism.

What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perles and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Roves to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

Now let me be clear: I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He's a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.

But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.

I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.

I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the middle east, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Queda.

I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars.

So for those of us who seek a more just and secure world for our children, let us send a clear message to the president today.

You want a fight, President Bush? Let's finish the fight with Bin Laden and Al Queda, thru effective, coordinated intelligence, and a shutting down of the financial networks that support terrorism, and a homeland security program that involves more than color-coded warnings.

The entire speech is available at Lawrence Lessig's site.  

Let's be clear here.  There was as much pressure on Obama to support the war as there was on Hillary.  She had access to intelligence that he did not.

He made the correct decision.

She did not and she is STILL NOT WILLING to say that she was wrong.  She has to qualify it, to equivocate, to say well if I'd known then what I know now, I wouldn't have done it.

That's the point.  Obama has the judgment part down cold.  Hillary does not.

Cross-posted from Dwahzon's Village

I'm not familiar with how long The Seattle Times makes their op-eds available online so here's one by a soldier returning from Iraq in its entirety. Do go to their website and read it there if possible. As testvet6778 pointed out, these comments "are from a serving mid level officer who works at the Brigade level of an Army unit from Fort Lewis deployed to Iraq. In other words it is from one of the mid level managers of the fiasco in Iraq and has to see it day in and day out, and he was lucky enough to make it home."

Questions from the front lines of a war that strains logic

By Brian J. Sullivan

HILLAH, Iraq -- My military tour of duty in Iraq ends in several weeks. We return home during a period of military success, to a decidedly anti-war nation and to an unclear future Iraq policy.

There is a certain pressure for those returning from this war to thump our chests, make proud claims of success, honor the fallen and extol a positive military spirit. Returning is a time to wave the flag; it's hard not to get caught up in those feelings of pride and conclusion.

My unit will focus on pinning medals and awards on returning soldiers, speeches by the generals, and maybe a homecoming event or parade.

But, tough questions will be on the minds of many as their flights leave Baghdad International Airport.

Was it worth it? Is the nation of Iraq we are attempting to assist worth the sacrifice? Will Iraq be different tomorrow because of our blood, sweat and a trillion dollars?

After serving here, I strongly disagree with the most common justification for the war.

U.S. Sen. John McCain has often commented, to paraphrase, "If we don't kill the enemy in Iraq, they will follow us home to America."

From the several hundred detainees I've seen here, and others I am aware of, I conclude it's unlikely that many of these illiterate dirt farmers and thugs caught planting roadside bombs, men who can barely feed themselves, or their children, would be able to mount a successful jihad against North America.

A closer look at the 9/11 terrorists should stiffen our resolve against radicalized, sophisticated, Westernized Muslims, from nations like Saudi Arabia, not Iraq.

Our concern should focus on sealing the U.S. border, and finding terrorists who can navigate the airports and the complexities of the First World, not the palm groves of Iraq.

I've thought about this a lot as I drove in convoys to our outlying patrol bases or flew over the palm forests along the Tigris and Euphrates. I thought about this as I crouched in bunkers as rockets were landing near me.

What I see are militia groups continuing their violent struggle for primacy and power. Iraq's primitive legal system is hardly functioning; it's a coin toss whether due process or torture will be applied.

The country's ancient power grid remains unimproved. The Mosul dam is near failure but the Iraqi government will not act to stop potential catastrophe. Iraq's police are corrupt and unreliable. Iraq's army is better, but struggling with basics like putting shoes on its soldiers' feet. The graft-dominated central government seemingly controls little.

Contrast this mess with the actions of our young U.S. soldiers. They do their combat patrols on bomb-infested roads and kick down doors of houses that could be rigged to explode. Their behavior and competence have cemented my trust in the military leaders and troops I serve with here.

I wish I could say the same of my confidence in our D.C. policymakers.

Iraq is a war being waged with a military that is stretched to the bone. Can we respond elsewhere in the world if we had to? The reality is, the U.S. Army has insufficient troops to extend the surge in Iraq without ordering 18-month rotations.

I've watched more than a dozen congressmen come into our forward operating base for their 60-minute briefings and photo opportunities.

After one briefing, I listened to a general and State Department official talk about how a large group of federal elected officials ignored the presentations, looked at their watches, or stared at the ceiling. They didn't care about the details. But, details matter, and should matter to policymakers.

It is that kind of highhandedness that will keep us fighting here.

I leave Iraq loving the organization of the Army, and grateful for the hard sacrifices of my fellow soldiers.

I leave Iraq unsure ... whether the true reason we are here, as Alan Greenspan recently opined, is that we are fighting for oil, regional stability and protecting our oil-based economic system.

I leave hoping the American people will fire their congressmen next year, especially if they are arrogant toward those risking their lives in a mission they directed.

Most of all, I challenge the soundness of the logic that what we are getting in Iraq is worth the steep cost in American blood and treasure.

Brian J. Sullivan is an infantry brigade staff officer in Iraq and formerly served two terms, from 1997 to 2001, in the state House of Representatives representing Tacoma and Pierce County. The views in this guest column are his alone.

Cross-posted from Dwahzon's Village

Riverbend has a new blog post up talking about her adjustment to living in Damascus as a refugee from the violence in Baghdad.

Bloggers Without Borders...

Combine it with this post, Leaving Home..., about their decision to leave Baghdad and the wait once they had decided to go and it puts other things we worry about in perspective.

Cross-posted from Dwahzon's Village

Sometimes someone gives you a new perspective on a news story with such impact that words are difficult to find to describe it adequately.

Dailykos diarist debel u has done just that.

Have a good read.

Cross-posted from Dwahzon's Village