The Military Side of War Cont. - AP reports that

The U.S. military closed down two major highways into Baghdad, the latest disruption caused by intensified attacks by anti-U.S. insurgents.

Remember, people: "Amateurs talk strategy; generals talk logistics."

(Via Obsidian Wings.)

You're Fired - Khidir Hamza doesn't get to be the Apprentice any more:

After the war, Dr Hamza was rewarded, to the distress of many Iraqi scientists, with a well-paid job as the senior advisor to the Ministry of Science and Technology. Appointed by the Coalition Provisional Authority, he had partial control of Iraq's nuclear and military industries.

It was not a successful appointment, according to sources within the ministry. Dr Hamza seldom turned up for work. He obstructed others from doing their jobs. On 4 March, his contract was not renewed by the CPA. It is now trying to evict him from his house in the heavily guarded "Green Zone" where the CPA has its headquarters. He could not be contacted by The Independent but is believed to have taken up a job with a US company.

Find out which one and sell it short.

Warblogging IV: Returning of the Snark - This just in, from the Borowitz Report:

CHENEY DEMANDS PAY RAISE FOR DOING BUSH'S VOICE

Joins 'Simpsons' Actors on Picket Line

Vice President Dick Cheney today joined the cast of the animated series "The Simpsons" on the picket line, demanding a substantial pay raise for doing the voice of President George W. Bush.

"Vice President Cheney has been providing the voice of President Bush since January of 2001," a spokesman for the Vice President told reporters. "All he wants is a salary that reflects that contribution."

Hat tip: Mrs. Offering.

Warblogging III - The argument that "the Arabs" or "Muslims" respect strength and strength alone never made much sense to me. Mark Steyn writes that most of them just want to be on the winning side, which must surely mean that the vast majority of Palestinians want to be on Israel's side, right, since Israel's been kicking their butts for 55 years? And Al Jazeera must be full of admiring profiles of Israeli and US puissance.

But the latest counterfactual must be Fallujah and Najaf. In Fallujah the insurgents are holding their own, but in Najaf, the Sadrists clearly still have the upper hand. But Fallujah is also getting the crap pounded out of it, bit by bit, and it's Fallujah that is the cause celebre. Given arguably successful defiance of the Occupation at two different sites, the one that resonates is the one where we're Showing the Most Resolve^TM.

What's it mean? It's the humilation, stupid.

Warblogging II - Stayed home yesterday to do taxes and discovered that our regular mailman is back on his route - home from Iraq on his reserve stint. Where in Iraq? Fallujah. I'm glad he's back, my neighbors are glad he's back (I've talked to them about it), he's glad he's back, and we hope he's back for good.

Thousands of other Americans are not back from Fallujah. His being back means that someone else has to be there (at least by the logic of intervention). We're glad anyway, which means we're glad someone we know slightly is out of a danger that someone we don't know at all is in. Why is that? The answer is the beginning of political wisdom.

Warblogging I - At Better Angels of Our Nature (fast becoming the most important blog going), Arkhangel lays out his plan for winning in Iraq, as opposed to just not losing. It is substantial and thoughtful, probably the single best real plan I've seen, and I'd like to say more about it tonight or this weekend. In the meantime, I suspect it's doomed. Not just because it requires scraping up 300,000 military personnel either. It relies on flooding Iraq with non-combatant civil affairs personnel - Peace Corps equivalents acquired via draft - that the insurgents have already made it a priority to drive away via kidnapping and murder.

Here's what we know about the O.G. among the resistance: they are perfectly willing to turn Iraq into Greater Lebanon to get the US out. (The Lebanon of the early 1980s.) That means, first, making every foreigner a target. The American public reaction when unarmed, drafted 20-year-old reconstruction personnel start buying it from drive-byes and car bombs will, well, test that resolve the hawks are always adducing.

But maybe that's just me. And Arkhangel has at least given us more than "stay the course," which is a real service. You're certainly not going to get that kind of thing from the government.

Mission Accomplished - Ah, taxes. I put them off and put them off and by the time I've installed TaxCut and opened the forms, it's over in a couple of hours. The only bad part is writing the check to the Free State of Baltimore Stadiums. Mind you, it "helps" that last year was a tight one financially, and that I am, in Alan Bock's formulation, better at advocating capitalism than practicing it - the Unqualified income streams are few, small and clear: pebbly little brooks of wages and a freshet or two of dividends.

TaxCut shows you how your wages and taxes compare with the national average, from which I conclude that: the middle class is not heavily taxed at the federal level. Almost unavoidably, any tax relief plans are going to take more dollars off upper-class earners. This suggests that the bulk of voters will be a lot more exercised about the prospect of tax increases than energized by the possibility of tax cuts, which surely has as much to do with the loss of momentum toward shrinking the federal government as Republican fecklessness.

And here's another thing: tax preparation software has gotten so good that for ordinary earners - wages, income, dividends, mortgage-plus-state-tax-plus-charity deductions - completing a return is a cinch. And from what I can tell, the programs seem to handle all sorts of contingencies I barely understand, let alone have a need for. That means that an awful lot of voters don't feel the pain of a complex tax code either - the computer handles the hard part. You can say that the code's complexity makes it hard to plan, but even there, a lot of the tax and financial management programs can help that area too.

That means that we libertarians face a serious annoyance gap: not only are middle-class voters not feeling especially taxed, they're not feeling the pain of our bizarrely involuted tax code either. That tax code still comes with huge transaction costs and philosophical problems - it's still a congeries of social engineering initiatives disguised as a revenue system. (Ironically, the social engineering probably fails because the code is too complex for ordinary voters to plan around.) But politics favors the pissed. And we don't have a mass movement of the pissed now when it comes to taxes.

Burning Down the House - Hellboy reviews from Peiratikos (pro) and Johnny Bacardi (anti). Also, Franklin Harris from last week (pro). I remain mildly pro. But you should definitely buy the books - at the very least Seed of Destruction and Right Hand of Doom.

Bang, You're Dead - The LA Times suggests gun rights groups are not all that pleased with how the Bush Administration turned out. The Democratic field as a whole has gone a long way toward undoing the damage Al Gore did with his embrace of gun control in 2000. A combination of better Dem rhetoric and uninspiring Repub performance may accomplish the most the Kerry campaign can expect, which is to cool off that particular hot button.

And it's not just guns:

Surprisingly, the issues that have most alienated many gun groups from the Bush administration have little to do with firearms, but rather with the Patriot Act and other homeland security measures instituted after Sept. 11. Opposition to such laws has aligned gun-rights activists with unlikely partners, such as liberal Democrats and the ACLU.

"It's not just gun rights for us, it's the Bill of Rights," said Angel Shamaya, executive director of KeepAndBearArms.com, which claims tens of thousands of supporters. "A lot of gun-rights advocates are from mildly upset to livid over President Bush and his administration."

It's a shame these groups are "unlikely partners." Liberal rights groups have been terrible on gun issues. Certain gun rights organizations have been pretty quick to go "Do what you want with the girl, but leave me alone" on the First Amendment rights of the entertainment industry when it seemed expedient. Can't we all just get along?

Keep Those Cards and Letters Coming In! - I've got some great mail I'm having to neglect for the next couple of days. My apologies - gaming night and taxes wait for no one. We should have a really good mailbag item or two toward the end of the week. Lots of "Defeatist" and "Crux" mail.

Look Over There - I pontificate on incestuous blogospheric issues. At - the Agitator??? Yes.

Pep Talk - Tacitus lists some successful (on his terms) counter-insurgency wars, and concludes

This war will continue. Changing presidents won't change that. It will be on your headlines and your television for years to come. The question before you as an American, then, is whether, how, and by whom you want it won. In that order.

which is seriously out of order. (And for that matter, "by whom" and "whether" seem redundant.) My order:

1. Define winning.
2. Figure out how or if you can "win" per item one.
3. Determine whether the how is worth the win as defined.

Ridiculously In-Group Sourcing - Inside-the-Beltway libertarian and UO personal pal Chaim Karczag, official housemate of journalistic superstar Julian Sanchez, has started an education-oriented blog. He's managed to produce content for a week now, so it's probably safe to link.

The Military Side of War - One of the arguments out there is that the Iraqi insurgents can't hope to prevail militarily because of our superior force. They can only sap our political will. But that may not be entirely true. The various rebel groups have been playing havoc with our supply lines in and out of the country all week. At one point there was no safe land route from Baghdad out of country. And they're still at it. Add to that last week's complaints from some US units that they were short on ammo (if they weren't disinformation).

Airlifts into Baghdad will only get you so far. At the very least, we might reach a point where the supply situation makes it hard to conduct offensive operations. Again, we somehow keep forgetting, but Iraq is very, very far from the United States. We have a logistical capacity second to none, but we may not have adequate forces in theater to protect our own supply lines.

If we believe Herodotus' accounts of what has been known throughout the ages as Victor Davis Hanson's War, the Persians in Greece outnumbered the local defenders by an order of magnitude or more. But Xerxes had to turn around anyway once his supply line was cut. The retreat wasn't pretty. (Note: One of my military experts does not consider the above speculation crazy.) Anyone thinking of reinforcing our existing contingent has to add not just enough firepower to increase our offensive capability, but enough to better secure not only our existing logistical tail but the larger one more reinforcements require.

Eye in the Sky -Reader Oyster Gal sends a picture of a "hole-punch cloud." The explanatory text contains the word "virga," which doesn't sound work safe, but is.

On my Radar - New-to-me blog, The Better Angels of Our Nature. The proprietor, Arkhangel, is apparently a liberal soldier who has been in and out of Iraq and has a lot of level-headed analysis. I'm just really digging into this site, but there's no reason you need to wait for me.

The Crux - Wish I had more blogging time tonight. There's some excellent mail and interesting reaction elsewhere to Saturday night's item (looks like Sunday morning to you). I hope to get to it, somehow, between gaming night and taxes. In the meantime, Kevin Drum has a useful critique of Fareed Zakaria that nevertheless reminds me that I have miles, miles, I'm telling you, to go before I sleep:

Thanks to the Bush administration's arrogance and unwillingness to make realistic plans on the ground, America's ability to credibly project power will probably be lower next year than it has been since the end of Vietnam - and that's not due to ANSWER protests or speeches by Ted Kennedy. This is George Bush's national security legacy to the nation.

I don't exactly disagree. But underneath a lot of criticism of what the Bush Administration has done and not done in Iraq is the suggestion that a smarter Presidential team could have made the whole thing work. This belief is probably prevalent among the liberal readership I've picked up because I'm so critical of the war the Republican Administration started.

I get the pragmatic politics of this stance. Focusing on missteps after the invasion phase of the war seems safer than attacking the war as such, especially given that the Democratic Party did essentially nothing to stop it. And as I've said before, whatever else war is, it's a massive government program. Your average Democrat figures there has to be a way to make that kind of thing work.

But I think they're wrong, and I need to start spending more time on why. This thing was always going to go in the pooper. We'd be in the pooper even if George Bush appointed Al Gore to run the National Security Council. Granted, maybe a different pooper. But the war has gone the way it has for reasons that merely changing personnel wouldn't fix.

Let's hold up a couple of mirrors. In this one, Republican loyalists complain that the crypto-treasonist left, unwilling to make common cause with a hated conservative President, snipes and lowers morale and just generally keeps the Bush team from doing everything they'd like to do to bring about the free, peaceful and incidentally pro-Israel Iraq of our dreams. This is not the hypothetical part of our exercise.

Well, okay Republicans. We'll always have the Democrats. And we'll always have a sizable contingent of people like, um, me who refuse to get with the nationally great program. And this is still a representative democracy and your guy is still going to have one eye on November and the other on - actually, that one's on November too.

You're just not going to get better conditions than you actually got. If those conditions make it impossible to run the enterprise the way you're sure it had to be run, you should have thought of that before you left home.

Now, let's flip it around. John Kerry, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, [Your Dream President Here] has just concluded a smashing desert offensive, and now it's hot and the power is out all over Mesopotamia. You have such plans, though!

And you've got domestic opponents you have to get them past - those snarling troglodyte Republicans who were so beastly to Bill Clinton about saving Kosovo, to whom your marvelous mulitlateral stewardship concepts are anathema, who hate the Democrats so much that they'd guzzle sour milk as soon as let one accomplish anything he wants to accomplish.

They're not going anywhere either. And, you know, Democratic Presidents too have been known to take electoral concerns into account in their decision-making. And they have, in the DLC and at the New Republic and hanging around Brookings, quite a few opinion leaders whose views are not really that distinct from those of the PNAC and the Weekly Standard.

Pick any vision of "postwar" Iraq, and you've got no chance of seeing it through. And that's not even taking into account how the pesky Mesopotamian clients react. The Iraq War was an inherently grandiose undertaking, and grandiose is just what our government is ill-suited to accomplish. Thank God, I say. You may feel differently. But it don't matter how you feel. I mean, I care about your feelings, but reality doesn't.

A Fanboy's Wish-Fulfillin' Notes - Acrobatics negates falling damage! From the Melbourne Herald Sun (link forthcoming):

A junior gymnast fell from a fourth-floor hotel window -- and performed a somersault on the way down to land feet first.

Steven Jehu, 17, tumbled 10m [33'] after a metal bar on the window broke when he tried to open it.

Jehu, a British junior champion was in the Slovenian captial Ljublijana, preparing for the European titles.

He twisted as he fell and escaped with a broken ankle after landing on grass.

See? Daredevil is real! Real!

Department of Corrections - I wrote

Jesus but Captain Chown is everything we could ask for in an American fighting man.

Adam Cole writes

Well, everything except for a Y chromosome. Capt. Chris Chown is a "she", at least according to this.

I blame 80s literary fiction, when people like Jayne Anne Phillips and Anne Beattie gave all their female protagonists male-identified nicknames. Captain Chown was probably born a few years before that, but that doesn't mean I don't need some kind of scapegoat.

UPDATE: Jeff Parks caught this too.

FURTHER UPDATE: I've become convinced that this was a misunderstanding based on a typo - that the Times printed "she" but meant "he." There are soldiers in Iraq, and female soldiers under fire, but female marines are excluded from the combat arms.

Suspense - Ghaith Abdul Ahad, known throughout the blogosphere as G. in Baghdad, reflects in the Guardian on the Friday's anniversary of the toppling of the statue in Firdos Square. There's an awful lot about the hopes renewed, dashed and persisting, concluding:

Do I regret the war, especially now that things seem to be moving towards chaos here? Not at all. I still think we are much better off than under Saddam. At least now we are free to dream.

I think everything hinges on the following set of questions: How many Ghaith's are there? What can they accomplish? What will the US let them accomplish?

Capsule Comics Reviews - Bunch of stuff I bought this week, with an unplanned prurient focus.

Queen and Country, Operation: Storm Front (Greg Rucka and Carla Speed McNeil) - $15 trade paperback. An improvement in every way over the previous volume, Operation: Blackwall, to which I was lukewarm. The plot makes more sense this time around and Speed McNeil's art works very well. For one thing, she's wrestled protagonist Tara Chase's tits into submission, which has not usually been the case with other artists. As Tom Crippen put it when reviewing the earlier volumes, it has often been the case that Chase's breasts "could kill livestock if swung properly." Let me hasten to point out that I have nothing against prodigious racks in real life - I married Mrs. Offering, after all - but in the context of adventure comics, they have a certain fanboyish disreputability about them. (Never wear anything on your chest that's bigger than your head.) Speed McNeil's Tara Chase is a plausibly attractive professional woman with a body built for effective action, not teetering display. Apparently some people don't like Speed McNeil's anime-influenced (to these ignorant eyes) art, but I'm in the tank for it. There's a superb, charcoaled car crash at the end of Chapter 3, and two terrific pages early in Chapter 4 of Tara slinking through an alley after a kidnapping, taking advantage of every woman's quick change ability. And the kidnapping attempt itself is nicely handled, both the writing and the art. Speed McNeil's expressionist lettering is a treat, too. (And if you want a Finder in-joke, the Caracas medical examiner at the beginning of the book is an obvious Medawar.)

The big problem with Queen and Country has always been that it's a great, self-conscious Sandbaggers homage, but has largely stalled out at that level. It's not just that writer Rucka hasn't taken the story "beyond" its source material. He hasn't equalled it. There's been nothing so far with the emotional intensity of the death of Laura Dickens or the pity and terror of D. Int's treason or the horror of the shooting of Willie Caine in Malta. There are a half dozen and more episodes of Sandbaggers that are as gripping as anything ever done for television, and that with crappy late-seventies ITV production values. Rucka has given us a terrific, brief sequence related to 9/11 in the earlier Operation: Crystal Ball, but his own obvious love for the source material deserves better.

I suspect, though, that if, like almost every other person on earth, you never saw Sandbaggers in the first place, you'll be able to enjoy QandC for its solid story-telling. However, you really should pick up the DVDs. (And so should I! Next paycheck!)

Mrs Offering complains: I'm sick of Minder Three being killed off all the time.There's been at least three of them so far.

Thessaly, Witch for Hire 3 of 4 (Bill Willingham and Shawn McManus) - The legendary, heretofore immortal witch tries desperately to learn how to destroy a "tharmic null," which is coming to get her in issue 4. She gets the answer, but it's in oracular form. Some fun, fairytale-style visuals. Basically, a nice diversion. Won't change the way you look at life, will let you pass the time pleasantly. Another in Vertigo's recent push to convince people it's not all darkness and anomie all the time for them, just like in the more enjoyable

My Faith in Frankie 4 of 4 (Mike Carey, Sonny Liew and Marc Hempel) - In which we conclude the story of the god, Jeriven, and his sole worshipper, seventeen-year-old Frankie Moxon. Hunh. I just realized this item amounts to a Stories of Small-Breasted Women roundup, what with the previous two titles and this one. In Frankie, your male wish-fulfillment comes not from mammaries but from female b-i-s-e-x-u-a-l-i-t-y. (Not shown.) Hey, I'm not immune to the charms! But I also recognize that it's very much a convention of male fantasies, so the conclusion feels a little flat. Too bad, as this has been quite the sweet series - easily the nicest light-hearted comedy about young love, pagan worship and demonic possession I can remember reading. Writer Mike Carey proves he can work on a much more intimate scale than the Nobilis-like epics of his Lucifer series, and Sonny Liew is an expressive cartoonist. It's also interesting to see him inked here, since I believe that his independent series, Malinky Robot, is shot directly from pencils.

Captain America and the Falcon 2 (Christopher Priest, Bart Sears and Rob Hunter) - So much for the small-breasted women portion of our survey! Anyway, this really blows.

Batman: Death and the Maidens 8 0f 9 (Greg Rucka and Klaus Janson) - That's a lot of parts. It feels like we lost the thread back there somewhere. I think THE Story is supposed to be a contrast of how anti-hero Nyssa and hero Batman are molded by their respective parentage issues. (Nyssa is the daughter of Ras al Ghul, and Batman, if you've never read, lost his parents to crime as a child.) The best parts of the series were Bruce's psychopharmaceutical reunion with the shades of his mother and father. The problem is that, right now, that sequence looks mostly gestural - his mother laid certain injunctions on Bruce about how to live in a way that would honor his parents. The story of how he tried to square those injunctions with his self-chosen calling as a vigilante would make an interesting story, but with only one issue left and the action focused on whether Nyssa will accede to the leadership of her father's organization, it doesn't look like we're going to get it. Oh well.

Oh! You want to know about breast sizes, don't you! Nyssa and Talia, both reasonable, if a bit more flamboyant than Tara Chase or Frankie Moxon. Still, nothing science-fictional in their tunics.

Supreme Power 9 of 12 (J. Michael Straczynski, Gary Frank and Jon Sibal) - Or at least, it was supposed to be 9 of 12, right? There is no longer any indication in the cover or indicia that this "Ultimate JLA" title is a limited series. I'm still enjoying it a lot. It's a dark book, and it's still wrapped up in the interaction of imagined super powers and real-world politics I pronounced myself bored with a couple of months ago, but it's holding my interest anyway. Hyperion has figured out that the US military has lied to him about pretty much everything his whole life. Since he's no longer under government control, he's considered a government threat. So they make a serious attempt to wipe him out. Does it work? Well, we don't find out yet. Interestingly, since this is an out-of-continuity title, there's an outside chance that Hyperion really does go down for good - there's at least minimal, genuine suspense in the cliffhanger. No breasts to speak of in this male-centered chapter.

UPDATE: Ras al Ghul and Batman have never had a child together. A certain comma has been added to its proper place. Thanks to Teresa Nielsen Hayden and Kip Manley for the heads up.

Imitation Tech Blog Item - I wanted to take the quiz that tests whether you can tell LGF commenters from actual German Nazis, but Geocities shut it down for exceeding its bandwidth allocation.

But here's the thing: the shutdown page is graphics-heavy, with banners and ads and pictures, and no one knows ahead of time not to click through because that's all they're going to see. So how much bandwidth is Geocities saving themselves?

UPDATE: My informant who sent me the link suggests that since the Geocities shutdown page has an ad on it, it's at least generating revenue.

Also, I got a 77 out of a possible 100. Interestingly, my relative accuracy had nothing to do with any particular gap in virulence between the Little Green Footballs comments and the words of Late German Fascists. In fact, of the three I got wrong, I missed two of them because I decided the comments were too exterminationist to be other than that of actual Nazis. But in most cases the tip-off is not hatefulness but unavoidable internal markers - anything about "deserving a State" is obviously Palestinian-related etc.

Kinder, Gentler UO I - In all seriousness, isn't there a bright side to the fact that

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A battalion of the new Iraqi army refused to go to Fallujah earlier this week to support U.S. Marines battling for control of the city, senior U.S. Army officers here said, disclosing an incident that is casting new doubt on U.S. plans to transfer security matters to Iraqi forces.

as reported by Thomas E. Ricks in the Post today?

Ricks writes

Eaton said members of the battalion insisted during the ensuing discussions: "We did not sign up to fight Iraqis."

It's damned inconvenient for us right now, true. And some Iraqi security forces have not just refused to fight but have actually fought against us. But Iraqi armies have been all to willing to "fight Iraqis" in the country's history. This may be an odd kind of progress.

Late Night Thoughts of a Defeatist - As I alluded last night, I've been heartsick over the Iraqi situation, the politics of it and my own relation to those politics. My defense mechanism has been a black humor that led the estimable Andrew Olmsted to ask me today, "Are you turning your site into just a snarkfest these days?" which is a fair question. In fact I've been a cauldron of emotions about things, which I've avoided addressing directly here because a) it's hard to write about, and b) past a certain point it's self-indulgent. Yesterday, while reading this Post story about the battle for Fallujah at lunch I found myself tearing up. The proximate cause was the juxtaposition of two passages, one at the end of the article

As the Marines contemplated how to intensify attacks on the enemy without alienating the general populace, several officers said they were keenly aware that one mistaken shooting could create hundreds of enemies, and that coming under constant fire could numb military forces to the humanity around them.

"I hope we don't get to the point where we are so jaded we start rolling down the streets in tanks and shooting at everything that moves," said Capt. Chris Chown. "If you start to lose that sense of humanity, you've lost your mission."

and one at the beginning:

After four days of round-the-clock street clashes with elusive, heavily armed urban guerrillas, U.S. Marines moved Thursday to beef up their fighting capacity and take more aggressive action against an enemy that is proving both stubborn and resourceful. Helicopter gunships over the city made repeated dives at clusters of fighters, and artillery was brought in for the first time.

(My emphasis.)

Jesus but Captain Chown is everything we could ask for in an American fighting man. I am absolutely convinced that he is the norm in our military, with a sound sense not only of his own moral duty but of the practicality of maximum feasible decency.

And he is hitched to an engine called circumstance dragging him down a hard black road to a destination labeled GROZNY, and he will claw at the pavement the whole way there trying to slow his progress and in the end he will get there anyway, because the outskirts are visible already: "artillery was brought in for the first time."

Artillery is not a precision weapon, which is why it wasn't part of the initial assault. I even read an article before the Fallujah operation began in which the commanders said they were sticking to infantry as much as possible to be as precise as possible, to do as little damage to noncombatants and property as possible because shelling gives you this and this and this and that's what Captain Chown's superiors were hoping to avoid, but they also intend to win, and if they can't win without artillery they'll win with it.

And elsewhere in the Post article, Lieutenant Colonel Byrne "estimated that 80 percent of Fallujah's populace was neutral or in favor of the American military presence," which means that 20% of Fallujah is hostile, which is 60,000 people, and a marine assault force expanded today, Saturday, to about 3,000.

Well, there we are. I said earlier in the week that I had no doubt we could suppress the current revolts militarily, but I didn't know if we could do it without major self-inflicted political wounds.

And I had spent the morning reading GinMar's journal from her arrival in Kuwait to the aftermath of the ambush in what was pretty clearly Kut, and over the month and a half's worth of entries you can really see one of two things happening: relations with the locals sour measurably, OR, GinMar simply gets familiar enough with the culture to perceive the animosities that have been there all along. Either way, the trajectory of her entries provides a bass line to April's crescendo of violence - it makes the claims that the Sadrist uprising is unconnected to any generalized mass hostility sound distinctly off-key.

And Deeds puts on a brave face about sitting unmolested in the Green Zone with a drink on his terrace despite reports that some group or other vowed to overrun the Green Zone, when the real story is not that he's safe in the compound but that he dare not leave it. And Salam stops blogging and Zeyad loses faith and Raed, bless his heart, tries to apologize for kidnappings that are in no way his fault and what I am contemplating is the likelihood that these good people, folks of whom we've grown internet-fond, are slaughtered - Western-identified secular cosmopolitans in a country where, as of the much-touted February poll, "only" ten percent of Shiites approved of attacks on Americans, which is to say, ten percent of 60 percent of 24 million people, which is to say, 1.4 million people more or less, plus 30 percent of Iraq's Arab Sunni population, which is to say 30 percent of 20 percent of 24 million people, or, actually, another 1.4 million people. And here and there Captain Chowns lose their battle to hang on to their humanity, and our people go nowhere but in armor and in force and at breakneck speed when they go at all and if they violate any two of these rules they die, and when they obey all three they strike the locals as like "giant lizards from another star."

And I saw it coming - really, I did - and I begged people not to go through with it and, like I said, here we are.

And now I feel anger, frustration, bitterness and guilt, which I think we can all agree is a pretty poisonous brew. Anger that Paul Wolfowitz could sit in front of Congress and say, with a straight face, Iraq has no history of ethnic strife - the sheerest, most bald-faced lie - and be allowed to do so much as discuss politics while bagging groceries at his new, more suitable position let alone keep the second-most important job in the Defense Department. Anger at the fundamentally dishonest metacontext in which questions of war and peace have been framed and continue to be framed. Anger every time an American soldier is blown up or shot, killed, blinded or lamed. Frustration that events of the last two years have made it that much harder to move the United States to a sane foreign policy and that much longer until we could reap the benefits of doing so. Bitterness about, well, whaddaya got?

And guilt. All kinds, really. Guilt that no intellectual is immune to the satisfaction of believing he has been proved right, and in this case the proof comes in the form of staggering misfortune to numerous others, countrymen and not. Guilt that my convictions as to what's best for the country alienate me not just from fools and knaves - they can go fly - but from good people like Andrew and from the combat soldiers themselves. We doves believe that we "support the troops" by trying to spare them from the wastage of "wars of choice" - the deaths, the maimings and the brutalizations - but many, maybe most of the troops themselves don't see it that way. I know because I've been told. Here's commenter Mike Shafer on Andrew Olmsted's site:

Jim,

Reading the entries posted make me sick. The only decent remarks are from Grey. I serve with LTC Sassaman and I was there. The News reports concern this event are mistrued, sadly Americans buy headlines and gossip and newspapers are in the business of selling. I wish I was allowed to tell you the truth but OPSEC has it that I can't. We were in Balad which is no secret, how many things do you hear in the news concerning the area we just left? None, our city is still secure and safe unlike the rest of the Sunni triangle. Ever wonder why that is? What concerns me is that we have done tremendous things over there and we have sent numerous articles to several papers that never got printed. What I read here is the classic case of the man in the arena. I want you to know that soldiers in the Battalion will follow LTC Sassaman anywhere, any time. You will never know what that is like. You say grey confuses patriotism for team spirit well fortunate for you, you will never have to look into a 19 year old kid's eyes after 11 mortar rounds have just landed on you with some of your men wounded and say "move out, get to your CP on the north side". Or would you say hey let's go out and tell them that's not nice. Only we will understand.

And I never will understand. And I'm sorry that, not only have I said things that sicken Mike Shafer and those like him, but that I'll do it again, even knowing how he feels. One of the things that has most angered me about this war is that people like Lieutenant Colonel Sassaman and his charges - two of whom are accused of drowning blogger Zeyad's cousin - were needlessly put in a position where the fear of irregular warfare, the unceasing mistrust, would coarsen good men and pressure a certain number of them into brutality of the kind that is not just a crime but a mistake. I want to save Mike Shafer and LTC Sassaman and Captain Chown and their fellows from not only that situation but from as many future similar situations as possible. Mike Shafer and many of his fellows, however, figure that the situation is what it is, so just don't, for God's sake, make it any harder.

The chasm between those two perspectives is terrible.

And I won't stop, because this is the overriding issue of our time - how we got to where we are, how we get out, and how we prevent the people who got us here from dragging us in deeper - but people like Mike will feel the spittle of every invective and jibe I hurl at the fop who is presently his commander in chief, and some of the evidence for how the civilian leadership has gone wrong will be found in what the soldiers under their command suffer or mete out. But I've said all along, I'm a right-winger, and the whole basis of the right wing critique of political correctness is that feelings are not trumps. Understanding what it is like to be in that situation is important, but it is not the only thing that matters about that situation. And three soldiers have died in action in Balad just this week by my count. But I really am sorry.

I'm already rambling, but there's one last area of guilt to tackle. The other complaint of not just hawks but many soldiers is the argument that doves sap the national will and encourage our enemies to attack. After all, goes this argument, the only way an inferior force like the various resistance movements in Iraq can beat the US Army is if a critical mass of the home front turns against the war. The surest driver of domestic loss of enthusiasm is casualties. Thus our enemies have an incentive to kill troops so long as doing so will increase antiwar sentiment. Therefore antiwar sentiment increases the danger to soldiers.

There is something to this. Let me be very clear: I think the effect is much smaller than hawks imagine, and it misses an entire other side of partisan warfare: nation-building by the resistance. Guerrillas don't just aim to turn the occupier's home front against the war. They first aim to turn their own home front against the occupier. I've written about the mechanisms at length: provoke the occupation troops into overreactions that will alienate them from the locals and force the locals to choose between "us," the resistance, and "them," the foreigners. And you kill as many of the ones who choose the foreigners as possible. Iraqi guerrillas have killed a few hundred American soldiers, but they've killed as many or more translaters, ministers, local contractors and other "collaborators." I've read that the first victim of the Algerian resistance against the French was an assimilationist Algerian schoolteacher. It's pretty obvious that civilians in the United States can cheerfully bear the deaths of any number of Iraqi bureaucrats, entrepreneurs and fixers. So sapping American will can't be why the resistance murders them. The pattern shows just how important the "nation-building" aspect of guerrilla warfare is. And the killings of American soldiers would serve that end even if no domestic lip ever quavered - guerrillas kill soldiers so that soldiers will force locals to jump into rivers and so that soldiers will shoot innocent civilians at checkpoints because of bad cases of nerves so that the actions will produce more guerrillas and more sympathizers.

Further, there's a bizarre asymmetry here. Stipulate that doves are responsible for a certain number of attacks on our troops in theater. Obviously the government, by putting them there in the first place, and hawks, for supporting the deployment, are responsible for many more. Were the troops in places I'd like to see them, no Iraqi could get at them or would bother.

And one can question just who the hawks' argument is with, really. People like Max Sawicky and I were opposed to the Occupation of Iraq before the war ever started. The attacks on our troops haven't changed our minds at all. Any "will-sapping" operates on people who aren't like Max and me - people who support the war until they decide a certain level of futility has been reached. So the theory winds up being that doves have an obligation to shut up at the point when other people are inclined to start listening to them, because only a combination of war criticism and war setbacks sways the swayable - neither setbacks nor criticism alone will do it.

All that said, I accept the argument that, at the margin, the existence of antiwar sentiment in the US encourages the hope of more, which means more attacks on our soldiers than there otherwise would be, which means doves have a share - and only a share - of responsibility in the deaths of our soldiers. (Max denies this in his essay, with which I otherwise largely agree.)

And all I can say is, I'm sorry; and, it can't be helped. In a free country, decisions of war and peace are public decisions. Pace Tacitus, some wars are not worth winning (or, in some cases, "winning"), even if they can be won. A trivial violation of Godwin's Law suggests an immediate example, but there are plenty of others out there. Hawks often liken the Iraq war to "one battle" in the whole War on Terror. I think the "one battle" it is is Stalingrad, a snare we cleave to for a prestige value that we merely imagine to outweigh other imperatives. I could be right or wrong, but I'm not the only one who thinks this way, and in an open society we can only hope to prevail openly. I think the war has been bad for the country and that extending it to Iran and/or Syria would be worse and, this is where the guilt comes in, I think the matter is urgent enough to trump such encouragement as the argument gives our enemies in Iraq. But what that means is that I am as ready to sacrifice a certain number of soldiers for the national weal as any hawk, and just like them I'm doing the defining myself. I'm sacrificing far fewer than they are, and if I got my way, it would be fewer yet. But it doesn't feel good. And it doesn't matter how I feel, either. It is what it is.

And that's that, really. Nothing about the present situation feels good. And it's made me savage lately. But now that I've gotten this all out, maybe I can be somewhat less so. Most of the time.