THINGS WHICH AMAZE ME ABOUT THIS WAR
• We’re surprised that the Iraqis have little regard for the Geneva convention.

• We weren’t expecting so much guerilla warfare. We thought everyone would just give up and accept “liberation”. It makes me wonder about the sources of all our intelligence and how well this whole thing has been thought out.

• We seem so surprised that there are sandstorms in the desert.

• My friends who are ultra conservative – almost libertarian – questioning everything about the value of government – throw all those convictions out the window when it comes to the military action – and they become the biggest flag wavers.

• We think we’re getting semi-objective information from reporters who are "in bed" with the miliary unit they're reporting on.

• Before we started this thing all the experts (including those in the government) were making it out to be a cake-walk. Now they’re singing a different song which starts out “We didn’t say that...”

• Congress didn’t demand a solid estimate on the cost before committing.

• We failed to take the Turks and their relationship with the Kurds into serious account before opening this can of worms.

• Many of the people interviewed on TV or the radio seem think that this conflict is a response to the 9-11 terrorist attacks. But there does not appear to be any real connection between these groups. The radical Muslim groups responsible for the 9-11 attacks despise Saddam because he is too secularized.

Of course, you can’t know everything before you start out in an endeavor like this. But it seems to me that we’re missing some major cues.

Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate it that we have military people willing to put their lives on the line for principles. They do their job well (!!!). And they appear to be extremely sensitive about keeping non-combatants out of the middle. (The same can’t be said for the Iraqis which appear to be all too willing to use women and children as human shields. But in that culture individual life is relatively cheap -- we should have known that.)

I don’t think we can go back now. The war protestors are unrealistic at this point. But the longer we go at this, the more my initial sense that the whole idea is half-baked is confirmed. Saddam was a problem which needed some serious fixing. We’ve just chosen the wrong handyman strategy.

I hope I'm proven wrong.