“Soldier of Misfortune”

From Tuesday’s Post:
[Iraq] was a war with its own original sin: the Bush administration’s failure to provide enough troops. To make up the shortfall, the government chose to outsource responsibility for deciding who can kill and die for the United States to for-profit companies that employed tens of thousands of soldiers-for-hire: mercenaries, or private security [...]

A must read: “The Last Tour”, in The New Yorker, on the psychological horror that is war

William Tecumseh Sherman, one of our most revered criminals of war, remarked, “War is Hell.” I don’t think he quite had this in mind.
From the towed car, park rangers had already deduced who they were. They had called Kellee Twiggs, Travis’s wife, in Virginia. She had missed a call from her husband earlier that afternoon, [...]

Pearls Before Swine explains: Hagar the Horrible and the Iraq war

This is just too good.

A jarring dose of reality. Or: Why we need to end this senseless war

Before I tell my tale, I’ll offer full disclosure. When the aisle-crossing War Party first began to beat its drums, I straddled the fence, so to speak, unsure of my thoughts on the matter — neglecting questions Constitutional; countering claims that the war wasn’t really in our interest by, naïvely, averring that, having empowered Saddam [...]

Palin’s war prayer

All over the web, Sarah Palin’s already infamous address to ministry students at her former church:
“Our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God,” she said. “That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that plan is God’s plan.”
The first sentence, [...]

August is the cruelest month

John Zmirak, one of my favorites, offers a thoughtful plaint, recalling dreadful Augusts of the last one hundred years, at InsideCatholic.

“[I]t’s being fought — and not always fought (Mike and his men are engineers) — by men and women who may or may not agree with the war, but who promised to go if their country called, and who are honoring that promise.”

Rod has posted an absolutely heart-warming piece about the return of his brother-in-law’s unit from Iraq. The italicized line in the following block is, save, maybe the line where-with I titled this post, my favorite in Rod’s piece. Do read it.
The image above appears in the Baton Rouge Advocate today. It shows my brother-in-law, [...]

Iraqi prime minister suggests time-table; immediately disappears into mysterious car, never again to be seen

Just kidding. I hope. In to-day’s Washington Post, Sudarsan Raghavan reports that
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has for the first time suggested establishing a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops, a step that the Bush administration has long opposed.
Maliki floated the idea on Monday during a visit to the United Arab Emirates, where [...]