I guess maybe I’m the only one who doesn’t get it, who doesn’t have a strong opinion on what we should do about Iraq, who’s saddened and outraged and frustrated and impatient, but who just doesn’t know what to do about it.

The problem is, we’re there. So searching for solutions is not something we can turn over to the seemingly endless numbers of “think tanks” of various persuasions (are they all nonprofits, and what do they actually contribute to society?) and then sit back and wait for a wise pronouncement. The question of what to do next needs to be answered in real time—now—so we can move forward as best we can to a few other matters that lurk and have the potential to make an even greater mess of the world.

Today’s Star Tribune headline reads “66 Killed in Baghdad Car Bombing,” reporting on yet another in the round robin of Sunni and Shiite attacks. “They call for unity,” one survivor declared. “This proves to the Shiites that there is no unity."

“A Sadr official” the story continues, “said in a telephone interview that the U.S. occupiers were ultimately to blame for the explosion rather than militant Sunnis. ‘Yesterday, we asked the government for a timetable for the withdrawal of the occupation forces,’ he said. ‘As long as they stay, terrorist activities will increase.'”

At the end of the long article, were the words, “In other violence Saturday: • At least five Iraqi Army soldiers were killed in an ambush on a checkpoint south of Kirkuk, police officials said. • A bomb exploded near a police patrol transporting prisoners in Kirkuk, killing one prisoner. • In south Baghdad, police found six bodies dumped in a building under construction.” The violence, the killings, the overwhelming problems seem to be no match for the tenuous alliance trying to make the country work. It’s so precarious that Las Vegas bookmakers probably wouldn’t even give odds on the likelihood of a successful outcome—that is, a unified, reasonably successful country, operating without the need for permanent outside guardians.

Yesterday’s headline troubled me even more. It was about a memorial service for Brent Koch, a 22-year-old soldier from Minnesota who was killed in Iraq. He was the 39th Minnesotan to die, almost all of them young with their whole lives before them. Their deaths leave mothers and fathers and spouses and children devastated, mouthing words about how proud they are, how he loved his country, how he longed to be back home but just now there was a job to do over there. But one wonders if, when their tears have dried and their bravado is stilled, they don’t lie awake in the quiet of the night and wonder why, why, why.

What’s maddening is that there can be no satisfactory end to all this. The war on terror, more precisely the war on terrorism, will never end. It cannot end any more than the war on crime or the war on poverty or the war on drugs or the war on racism will ever end. We will, hopefully, make progress in all of those wars, but, in each case, our definition of victory is going have to be scaled back to accommodate the realities of life. That’s not necessarily an attractive prospect, but at least it avoids the perilous self-delusion that we can somehow achieve absolute, total success.


It breaks my heart that Brent Koch, age 22, missed so much in his brief life. It breaks my heart that thousands of young Americans have died, not to mention the scores of thousands of Iraqi people. Are our soldiers fighting to help Iraq become stable and self-sufficient, or are they fighting to defeat terrorists who threaten our country? If the former, history, rhetoric, and internal Iraqi hatreds suggest a grim prognosis. If the latter, one has to seriously question the disproportionate allocation of funds, personnel, and national resources being expended in Iraq relative to other ways we could fight this war on terrorism.

We started the war in Iraq, and we cannot, morally, walk away, leaving that country in shambles of our making. But to see young Americans continue to die, and our limited national resources wasted without real chance of success, is stupid and unacceptable. Unlike many of my friends, I’m not smart enough to know what the solution is. The question of what to do is one worthy of King Solomon. If only he were here to answer.