Tut tut.

or,
And you shake your head... hrmph ... and say it's a shame...

If his wiki entry is accurate, then Roger Cohen, international journalist, said this: Saddam's "death-and-genocide machine killed about 400,000 Iraqis and another million or so people in Iran and Kuwait. I still believe Iraq’s freedom outweighs its terrible price."

But now,
he sees the aftermath of America's defensive wars, up close and in person:

It would be tragic to ignore the lessons of Iraq, stumble onto a war train armed with flimsy evidence, and imagine Iran is close to a bomb when there’s no conclusive evidence it’s made the decision to build one. Remember, the mullahs love ambiguity. It’s their element, along with maddening inertia. To risk “breakout” is to risk the Islamic Republic. Hence the waiting-for-Godot aspects of their nuclear zigzag.

When I heard those words — “neuter that regime” — what I saw was a shattered body in Tampa. A third U.S war is inconceivable.

While I realize Mr. Cohen had company in originally supporting, in theory, the pre-emptive invasion -- both from his English countrymen and from the average overeager American suburbanite -- I must ask:

Did you think it would be a game? You never forsaw the bloody mess that war is? Really? All that international and war observer experience, and Cohen only now gets it, when he spies this?

The guy was sitting in the gloomy atrium of a hotel in Tampa, Florida. It was early morning, the plants were drooping and the lights mysteriously low — some kind of economy measure, perhaps. Anyway, he couldn’t see any of that. He was blind. And he had no right leg below the knee.

Terrible burns disfigured his arms and face. The right side of his head was concave, as if depressed by a savage blow. I tried to imagine the explosive force that had twisted his frame: a bomb in Iraq or an improvised explosive device near Kandahar, Afghanistan? There’s a big veterans’ hospital in Tampa.

Give me a break.

The time for compassion and calculating your losses is before you commit. Dry your tears already and recognize this wasn't President Bush's war(s), as much as the libs might like to pretend it...

These wars, the civilian deaths "over there" that overcompensate 10 times over for our own killed on 9-11 -- think mangled mutilated ... neutered bodies, of all ages and sizes -- happened on all our watch. Particularly the non-neutral journolists who were for the wars, before they were against them.

Cohen does get one thing right in this recent column: it's not wise for Israel, or any other Middle East country, to expect much in the way of warfare from overstrapped, fed-up American taxpayers. (Remember, the money financing all those deaths and materiels comes from what we workers pay in...)

We're kinda like Russia after her own excellent Afghanistan adventures: fiscally constrained, and facing internal needs and expenditures that are going to be hard to continue putting off into the future.

So the threats like the recent cargo bomb might be external, but we've tried overkill already, and look how that worked. At some point, people need to learn to live with insecurity, I think, because ... look at the alternative.



Who knows? Maybe a little bit of living with insecurity will make others consider the forseeable consequences of their actions. We forget that internal checks -- knowing our own limitations and boundaries -- are often the best medicine in keeping ourselves healthy at home.

And you remember what I've quoted here from my late friend Ruth, Mal's mother, right? A wise woman in the kitchen, "Your health is your wealth" was part of what she left behind. It probably works for healthy societies too.

Try it --- you might like it, and find yourself stronger for it too. Beats pity for a broken soldier, any day of the week.