They may have defined our strategic blindness when they quote an Iraqi man, "We need security, not free food". (This "free.." could have been applied also to arms and cell phones among others.) I heard a similar statement from my Iraqi colleague as I was leaving Baghdad in the spring of 2004 with the closure of the CPA. Asking her assessment of our work, she darkly stated: "You have been of no use." If only we could listen to such frankness.

As Soldiers are prone to do ours may have preempted their General. Like the scouts that airborne soldiers can be, they have defined a terrain that the September assessment, as it is prepared, needs to address. (Their letter will hold some higher degree of trust. It is without having a certification from the white house office staff.)

Sometimes, I wonder if their mission is not similar to those of the Union army in 1864 or of an isolated army in the Dakotas in the mid 1870s. Tides have are continually shifting but endurance is the only consistent requirement.

"As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.", they end.

The problem is we really don't know what through means; anymore than we can defined what our own security need may be.

But at least the food is free, or is it?

Dear Joan:

During my time with the CPA, Baghdad, in the spring of 2004, I would meet and discuss issues with a very hopeful man or woman who daily had to change names and/or clothing several times enroute to access a Zone that gave them promises.

Many, young and naive, had chased a new messiah that spoke of peace, dignity, freedom and of course material wealth. They worked in efforts named for giving justice, addressing war crimes and freeing women from the middle east's congenital yoke. It came with a promise of bringing them all dignity to that which the messiah proclaimed them endowed by birth.

As always, promises and messiahs tend to be transitory phenomenons. Chimerical and deadly is their characteristic ying and yang. Those young men and women - well, they are past and over the horizon like flotsam left in the wake of our grand ship of state.

Our soldiers who we sent to the crucible have again discovered what we are already knew. Us the older, who have shed our hard won wisdom, are being told the always obvious by the young whom we risk at our pleasure. They saw the flotsam.

And they oped'd to the vaccuum where the messiah dwells, to be proclaimed in an off week in the doldrum of the summer month when even the nightly news is barked by the second team. All else is not in sesson. And the soldiers' cries of murder and missing goals will complete with more notes on poisoned princesses and athletes with blood from animals on their hands but not on their uniforms.

These cries may not have any more life that Vick's dogs in Georgia; unless far more of us bark louder than it has sounded so far.

Joan:

Billions of dollars have disappeared from the treasuries in Iraq. They are being recycled, I am sure. So much of Iraq's cash wealth has been looted; but, its most lucrative wealth of oil reserves and the control of public utilities remain up for grabs among our various and ever changing friends and enemies. As has happened since the first days after 911 and continues, this Administration is being danced and storied thru the chapters of 1001 Arabian nights. Sinbad left Baghdad nine times on voyages for fame and fortune. How many times has Allawi departed to deposit what he carried out and to seed future extractions?

Barbour's is an enabler who is working the disasters at home (Katrina) and away (Iraq) quite nicely also.

Dear Joan:

Maybe we focus too much upon the Administration which is best discribed as the caretaker of a dead delusion. It is a vacuum when it comes to any vision concerning our national security or our intentions for what we hand to posterity outside a possible picure of a White House wedding, a staggering national debt and a globe full of annoyed friends and encouraged enemies.

Much of what runs Iraq, be it either from major forms of Islam or allied to whatever monarchy or theocracy or cell, has realized that opportunity exists in tag team dancing with the blind and lethally desperate mouse even if it is currently wrecking the neighborhood.

It is a real reality tragedy in which the same loser, always the mouse, voluntarily remains week after week and each winner gets a rotating chance for gaining profit from inflicted pain or successful fraud.

The best that can be said concerning the 300K now being spent on friendly elephants is that it is being removed from the winner's profit and not available, unless renewed thru supplemental appropriations, to fund cells or arms and elephant ivory traders.

Joan;

As has played out in the Gonzales mud drag and now in the Senator Idaho Potatohead opera, there is a continual tragedy/ comedy of very hollow men who can cause great damage without accountability. Toe tapping, indeed, not "that there is anything wrong" with that.

It would seem that we have degenerated into a society of continuously shouting advocates whose debate is not joined by a common thread of value or ethical foundation.

I am sure you must find it excruciating to deal with it nightly in the commentator hollywood square on MSNBC.

But thank you for withstanding it.