Portrait of the Fallen

If you squint you can see the hubris coming off of these two. This is the only time that these 4,000 young men and women will ever be on George Bush and John McCain's minds.



Every one of these deaths was a preventable tragedy.

Also, as Brandon Friedman notes, 25 of these men and women died in the past two weeks, an uptick of violence not seen since last summer.

We are now entering a period of Iraqi restlessness in which Sunni Sahwa militias are growing restive, Muqtada al-Sadr's ceasefire is on the verge of unraveling, and little political progress is being made. In fact, I received an email today from a friend in the Green Zone who told me he slept in his body armor last night--something not typically done these days. And it's not a good sign.

Perhaps this will give John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman pause to stop patting themselves on the back for five minutes in order to realize that they are not vindicated, they are still wrong, and any sort of resolution in Iraq will require a serious change from the current short-sighted Bush administration strategy of "pay them off until I'm out of office."

When the most secure and most transformed areas of the country are using Saddam-era brutalization tactics to keep the peace, you have to conclude that this war exacted a terrible cost on Iraqis, Americans, and the whole world.