This is awful…

…but not unpredictable, and, in this kind of war, probably unavoidable.

...on his third deployment in Iraq, he is no longer a believer in the mission. The pivotal moment came, he says, this February when soldiers killed a man setting a roadside bomb. When they searched the bomber’s body, they found identification showing him to be a sergeant in the Iraqi Army.

“I thought: ‘What are we doing here? Why are we still here?’ ” said Sergeant Safstrom, a member of Delta Company of the First Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry, 82nd Airborne Division. “We’re helping guys that are trying to kill us. We help them in the day. They turn around at night and try to kill us.”

In Vietnam, it was axiomatic that a percentage of the weapons issued to local defense forces would be in the hands of the VC by nightfall and aimed at us before morning. There's also a certain logic to the notion that someone willing to take up arms in defense of his country might harbor greater than average resentments regarding the occupation of his country. What seems like betrayal to us may be an expression of the highest patriotism.

It's awful, but, again, likely inevitable. It's something our soldiers will face as long as their mission is occupation, and yet another reason the occupation must end.

This is worse…

The officials described a tense standoff that ensued between the Blackwater guards and Interior Ministry forces — both sides armed with assault rifles — until a passing U.S. military convoy intervened.

American soldiers in the line of fire between our purported allies and the private mercenary armies of the war profiteers and frightened bureaucrats? We can hardly ask the Iraqis to give up their own private militias while we let Haliburton, et al, employ their own, and the risk to American forces is far too high and totally unecessary. Sadly, it's also by design, part of the Rumsfeld vision of a new military, with as many functions, including combat arms, contracted out as possible. War as even better business.

I hate what they're doing to my Army.