A Eulogy for Iraq (by Mark Danner in the NY Review of Books)

[Cheney Killed Bambi]

This latest piece by Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books will make you cry, but it is one of the best thing ever written on the Iraq debacle. It's beautiful, heartbreaking, and illuminating. Warning, it's looooooong, but well worth reading

In the ruined city of Fallujah, its pale tan buildings pulverized by Marine artillery in the two great assaults of this long war (the aborted attack of March 2004 and then the bloody, triumphant al-Fajr (The Dawn) campaign of the following November), behind the lines of giant sandbags and concrete T-walls and barbed wire that surrounded the tiny beleaguered American outpost there, I sat in my body armor and Kevlar helmet and thought of George F. Kennan. Not the grand old man of American diplomacy, the ninety-eight-year-old Father of Containment who, listening to the war drums beat from a Washington nursing home in the fall of 2002, had uttered the prophetic words above. I was thinking of an earlier Kennan, the brilliant and ambitious young diplomat who during the late 1920s and 1930s had gazed out on the crumbling European order from Tallinn and Berlin and Prague and read the signs of the coming world conflict.

For there in the bunkered Civil-Military Operations Center (known as the C-Moc) in downtown Fallujah, where a few score Marines and a handful of civilians subsisted in a broken-down bunkered building without running water or fresh food, I met young Kennan's reincarnation in the person of a junior State Department official: a bright, aggressive young man who spent his twenty-hour days rumbling down the ruined streets in body armor and helmet with his reluctant Marine escorts, meeting with local Iraqi officials, and writing tart cables back to Baghdad or Washington telling his bosses the truth of what was happening on the ground, however reluctant they might be to hear it. This young diplomat was resourceful and brilliant and indefatigable, and as I watched him joking and arguing with the local sheikhs and politicos and technocrats —who were meeting, as they were forced to do, in the American bunker —I thought of the indomitable young Kennan of the interwar years, and of how, if the American effort in Iraq could ever be made to "work," only undaunted and farseeing young men like this one, his spiritual successor, could make it happen.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19720

[many a good man]

1. Great read. K&R!

Danner is fantastic, as usual. He's been putting together a fascinating history of the Iraq War. Can't wait to see his next installment on where do we go from here.

So many villains and pathetic incompetent fools. I'd have to vote for Condi as the worst of them all. As National Security Advisor it was her job to fix "the interagency." Bureaucracies and instititutions are designed to prevent clusterfucks on the epic scale that has been Iraq. Impeachment is too good for all of them.

[Deere_John]

2. Shorter Danner: US is run by spoiled children n/t

[Cheney Killed Bambi]

3. kicking

so more people see this