We keep hearing from the White House that the purpose of our encursion into Iraq is to spread freedom and democracy. How does killing all military age Iraqi males jibe with spreading freedom? Again, we have military leaders who think that winning is a goal that supercedes all others. That's one of the problems that occurs when our goals are vague and open to interpretation. And naturally the folks that pay the price are the grunts on the ground who receive these crazy orders. These poor kids are caught in the middle. They are told to follow orders "or men die".

Here's an idea - let's make Dubya dig each and every grave for every soldier he's sent to die in a far off land. It would surely give him time to reflect on the decisions he's made.

It was only a week ago that John Podhoretz wondered if the big tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn't kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them."

I was reading this evening History of 16th century exploration of the Pacific. Here too when explorers write about their mistakes they seem to always say "we did not kill enough of the savages to let them know we mean business." Has our modern society grown so little in last 300 years?