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An unnamed editorial cartoonist serving in Iraq is calling out his colleagues for undermining morale with their pens. How? Drawing flag-draped coffins as symbols of military casualties. He writes: "[I]n many political cartoons, a flag-draped coffin is quickly becoming nothing more than a visual prop, a metaphor." In particular, he takes issue with a recent cartoon by Ann Telnaes which depicts Bush running on a treadmill of flag-draped coffins. Too bad it's a really good cartoon (not to mention that Telnaes totally rocks). But according to the soldier-cartoonist, alluding to the inevitable consequences of war is insensitive to the troops:

U.S. troops are trained to go into harm's way. That is their job. Fatalities are inevitable, though always tragic. The death of a soldier -- or 3,000 troops for that matter -- in and of itself is hardly an effective measure of the success or failure of military strategy, and it is an unfair example to use in painting the president as uncaring.

If anything, it is the cartoonists who are callous to our troops by their continued negative depiction in American op-ed pages.

This sounds like the standard media-undermining-the-troops argument: Our soldiers are fearless ass kickers, yet are vulnerable to a few editorial cartoonists who question the policies that unnecessarily put their lives at risk. So then, how in the world are cartoonists supposed to depict the concept of American fatalities? Admittedly, editorial cartoonists aren't known for having the biggest bags of visual tricks (even the versatile Telnaes has been on a coffin kick; see here, here and here.) Presumably, drawing corpses or skeletons or tombstones or the Grim Reaper would be even more offensive. It doesn't get much more sanitized than a coffin. Which makes me suspect that the soldier-cartoonist's actual beef is that his colleagues don't support the war. But if he really thinks that Americans can't handle a few sketches of pine boxes, perhaps he's in the wrong professions.

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Here's an interesting tidbit from "News War," the new Frontline documentary that begins tonight on PBS (read our review here). How can you tell if a government leak is true? Simple -- see if the FBI starts a leak investigation.

Below, Frontline's Lowell Bergman interviews former FBI counterintelligence director David Szady:

BERGMAN: How do you conduct [FBI leak investigations]...?

SZADY: Well, first of all, you have a victim agency, the owner of the information, those who classified it. What they have to do is file a report, which consists of 11 questions, and those questions go from was the material properly classified, was the information that was leaked accurate compared to what the actual classified information is?

BERGMAN: The information has to be accurate?

SZADY: Yes.

BERGMAN: So when the government announces a leak investigation and it comes to your office, it's confirming that the report in the newspaper, for example, or on television, was true.

SZADY: Yes. Indirectly, yes.

BERGMAN: That's one way to fact-check. [LAUGHTER]

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The Associated Press via the International Herald Tribune reports that Dutch engineers are considering creating "breaker islands" off the country's North Sea coast as a possible defense against rising sea levels caused by global warming. Should we be following their lead?

More than two-thirds of the Netherlands' 16 million population lives below sea level, and Dutch policy makers are counting on a rise in sea level of around 80 centimeters (30 inches) in the coming century regardless of the ongoing scientific debate on the causes and likely impact of global warming. Bakker cited a strategy increasingly being used to strengthen the dunes that protect the country's coast: pumping sand into strategic offshore locations where currents in the North Sea sweep them into place, bulking up the dunes.

"This strategy is successful and relatively cheap" in addressing immediate needs to strengthen the country's water defenses, Bakker said. "We could use a similar more natural approach in strengthening our coastal defenses in the longer term. For example, by creating a series of small islands off the coast ... instead of raising the current dunes or dams."

That would help protect against storm surges such as the one in 1953 that drove water near the Dutch coast more than 4 meters (13 feet) above normal levels, breaching defenses and killing more than 1,800 people. That set off a massive 40-year building project that made the country's water defenses among the strongest in the world. But the country's undersecretary of Transportation Melanie Schultz said the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina was a "wake up call" that more work remains.

"We can't delude ourselves that natural disasters occur only in developing countries," she said.

So while we misspend billions on the wrong war for homeland security, the Dutch are engineering really good defense systems designed for the watery battlefront of the 21st century.

The Dutch government approved a new euro14 billion (US$18.5 billion) increase in spending on water defenses and water quality improvements over the next 20 years in December. That's on top of euro3 billion (US$4 billion) in extra projects already in the works this decade against the threat from river floods, as Dutch climate models predict global warming will lead to more abrupt showers in the Rhine catchment area, whose water ultimately funnels through the Netherlands on its way out to the sea.

The recent IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) reports the seas will rise for at least 1,000 years. We'll need a whole civilization of Hans Brinkers with stout fingers and, well, not ice skates… maybe Jetskis.

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A study from the Medical College of Georgia tells a predictable yet neglected story, that the children of parents in the military during wartime have significant physical and mental health issues. Stress not only, well, stresses them, it also effectively ages them beyond their years.

Researchers looked at 121 adolescents – including 48 with civilian parents, 20 with a parent deployed to Iraq and 53 with a parent in the military but not deployed – days after Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched in March 2003 and nearly three months later when President Bush announced major hostilities had ceased.

At both points, adolescent offspring of military personnel self-reported higher levels of stress and measures of blood pressure and heart rates supported that.

"We expected stress levels would push up blood pressure and heart rates," says Dr. Vernon Barnes, physiologist at the Medical College of Georgia and principal author of a paper published in the January issue of Military Medicine.

Dr. Barnes and his colleagues used a posttraumatic stress disorder questionnaire developed by the military for personnel and modified for adolescents, a survey to assess psychosocial concerns such as sense of well-being and faith in government as well as more objective heart rate and blood pressure measures.

Not surprisingly, they found that particularly adolescents with deployed parents had higher rates than their classmates. Studies were done at the Academy of Richmond County, a high school in Augusta, Ga., attended by many children whose parents are stationed at Fort Gordon.

Casualties without boundaries.

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