"We have no mission."

These are last week's letters to Stars and Stripes, the US military's flagship news publication. You can read all day long about the godawful situation for soldiers in Iraq in the news, but here are the words of the poor men and women that are mired in the middle of it. Notice how many times you read some expression of frustration at having no mission.

Soldiers trained to operate artillery pieces and tanks are doing foot patrols and police work. Military parents are sending their children water, for Christ's sake. Guys are dying in their sleep, likely from dehydration and heatstroke. An unexplained, deadly disease is popping up around the country. Others are taking their own lives. For every dead soldier, there are many others whose bodies have been mangled, teenagers who will spend the rest of their lives in a wheelchair, others who will come home to their spouses and children disfigured and disabled. We aren't seeing many pictures of these soldiers, we aren't much hearing their stories. But we will.

There is no winning here. Morale is abysmal, and that bodes very poorly for our soldiers' relations with the very people they are trying to protect. Troops are so nerve-wracked, frightened, and hostile that they will shoot at anybody - even Iraqi police trying to arrest car thieves.

Every Iraqi shot turns another group of family and friends from grudging neutrality toward open hatred. The entire situation is a disaster. If power couldn't get back on in New York City in another couple of days, it would be a very dangerous place to be after sundown. Imagine, then, that it's 30-40 degrees hotter, unemployment is rampant, clean water is haphazard, you need an automatic weapon to defend your home against roving criminal bands at night, and you've been dealing with daily blackouts for six months. And then the army of the country that destroyed your power grid and water system and put you out of work shoots your brother or your neighbor or your husband.

Or your child.

It doesn't matter what you thought of the former regime; it's history and good riddance to it. Qusay and Udai Hussein are dead? Whatever. Now there is a new regime and, let's be honest, your day-to-day life at the moment is decidedly worse under it. How much longer is rhetoric about freedom and democracy from a smirking, pretend cowboy in air-conditioned DC going to keep you content to wait and see what happens?

The links in this post (and bits of the content) are from Steve Gilliard's blog, which doesn't seem to have any permalinks to reference. I share his fear that we may to have to fight our way out of Iraq, and I'm afraid that what follows that is a savage free-for-all. The Spanish Civil War with an Arabic accent. This administration has set a ball in motion that they have only a slim chance of controlling, and it isn't like they didn't have plenty of people warning them.

Every congressperson that voted to authorize this should have to suit up in full body armor and patrol Sadr City. And the PNAC crew that worked so hard to get us into this? They should be run out of Washington on a rail.