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.

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?

Joan;

There is a consistency in our society here. You can see it in the dominant structure of our cities. In San Francisco, its is the Transamerica Building; New York, once it was World Trade; Boston, Hancock;.... We herd around that which promises a continuity of income, that is our rock as Prudential wisely noted. When an America,such as Cheney speaks of quagmire he comes at that time from a prospective that sees no income. Although a creator of OMB A76, the rock behind outsourcing of the war, in 1991, the then Secretary of Defense was not in the position of gaining an annuity. During the 90's Cheney morphed from the government participant to the industrial titan finally with a fortune and the annuity club access. When bin Laden attacked our "main mosque" (just as he would later attack Shiite mosques) he provoke the response that would gain for Cheney the annuity as final reward. bin Laden the heir to world of Ali Baba became the benefactor for the Cheney an stident of Babbitt.

Dear Joan:

There are many things about this man I have found detestable; but, the sale of the war is not one of them. That is more the child of another cabal with agendas far from the red lands where Karl does his normal dirty work. The Iraq war caries a level of lethality and physical destruction that is beyond the character destruction arena of the wisper campaigns that Rove prefers. He is more of a house pet Rasputin which makes for the enduring esteem from the Bush family. His fate will always be tied directly to that of their camp follower.