Truth.

Gilliard gets it.

Because the first thing the compent Iraqi Army would do is turn on the US like a rabid dog. So we send them out in pickups, while Marines laugh at them for doing so. The problem is that many of them speak some English and most of us don't speak any Arabic. They smile in our faces, they do their jobs, but they hate us. Too many Americans die in ambushes and traps for that to be untrue.

Think about the new Iraqi army. Think about how many of them have lost a brother, father or son to American firepower. Think of how many have seen their mother, sister or daughter insulted, even humiliated, by American troops resentful of their assignment and ignorant of local culture. Think of the scorn heaped on them by many of their countrymen for their collaboration with the occupiers, and the risks they face in missions assigned and designed by their American overseers.

This isn't a 'blame the troops' rant. Soldiers and Marines are sent to combat zones to break things and kill people. It's just the job, an ugly one, but sometimes a necessary one. Our troops are real good at it. Ideally, you break enough of your enemy's stuff, and kill enough of his people, to force him to submit.

In Iraq, the stuff we break is the property of our putative allies. The people we kill are their families and neighbors. Our troops don't understand their social and religious customs, and worse, I fear, often don't care. They don't need to. Their job is to break things and kill people.

We've sent the best of a generation into harm's way on a lie, pursuing shifting objectives for which their particular skills, no matter how expertly employed, are particularly unsuited. While rebuilding schools, opening hospitals, restoring power - all the humanitarian efforts for which, it's true, too little credit is given in some quarters - are admirable, they aren't intrinsic to the real military mission, and if the real military mission is successful, those side jobs will never be enough to secure the proverbial hearts and minds victory.

The better the US forces are at their jobs, the more impossible their mission becomes. That contradiction, terrible in its consequences, is the result of the incompetence and corruption of Republican political leadership, not the men and women who serve.

Still, in this, as in so many things, Pogo was prescient…