How Iraq came home to haunt America

[cal04]

For months doubts over Iraq have risen along with the death toll. Last week a tipping point was reached as political leaders in Washington and London began openly to think the unthinkable: that the war was lost

Colonel Tom Vail is planning a road trip around the United States. It is his last, sad duty before returning to his family from eastern Baghdad. For when the commander of the 4th Brigade of the 101st Airborne arrives back in the States, it will be with videos of the memorial services held in Baghdad for each of his fallen soldiers to give to the families of the dead men.

He knows that some of the families will not want to see him, and he understands. Grief works in different ways, he says. For others, however, it will be an opportunity to talk, to learn something, he hopes, of the inexplicable nature of their children's deaths.

So, when he has a moment, when he is not driving round the battlefield that is eastern Baghdad, Vail examines the map and plans his flights and his car hire. And he wonders at the reception he will receive - a messenger of death, bringing the war back from Iraq to the home front.

For when Vail and his soldiers return, it will be in the knowledge that the United States that they are going home to is not the one that they left. That in their year-long absence a seismic shift has occurred in support for the war in Iraq. And that the deaths that Colonel Vail must carry back with him to grieving families - deaths that once seemed to Americans to be a necessary cost - now seem to the majority a dreadful and pointless waste.

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http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1928616,00.html

[rodeodance]

1. to think the unthinkable: that the war was lost --For many this is still

not on the radar screen.

[Skittles]

2. for many of us, doubts arose before the war even started

I really hate it when they insinuate ALL Americans are now finally seeing the f***ing light on what should have been F***ING OBVIOUS

[IndianaGreen]

5. The only thing we failed to see is how FUBAR things were going to get

The civil war in Iraq was predictable, what wasn't foreseen was to lose Afghanistan to the Taliban at the same time Iraq disintegrated.

[Skittles]

6. oh, I knew Afghanistand would go to hell

I'm a vet and I knew how stretched the troops would be when they diverted resources to Iraq

[bronxiteforever]

3. Another example of fine BRITISH reporting

Again and again its been the Observer and the Independent telling the truth (Asian Times as well). Very rarely is the American press writing stories like this-and I believe that the American press is just as responsible for this disastrous immoral undertaking as the Federal Government

[IndianaGreen]

4. Except for Blair, the Brits have been raising alarms about Afghanistan

and they have openly discussed leaving Iraq in order to salvage Afghanistan, which they see as still winnable.