MikeF:

I spent a career as a planning troubleshooter. Looking at problems, trying to understand what was wrong, and trying to fix it.

Without metaphysics, I find nothing depressing about tearing things apart in order to understand them better, and how to fix them.

I took this Tomorrow Morning thing to be about asking the positive question: How do I engage this? What can I do about it?

My simplistic and perhaps overly-sympathetic view is that this war stuff comes in two flavors: Big and small.

Small Wars are, perhaps, about confined and definable problems and objectives, but could also be viewed as a mission or campaign within a bigger war.

Since WWII, however, US ability to effectively engage in big wars seems to be increasingly bogged down in inter-agency infighting, variable political/military objectives, and, as a rule, a failure of "big picture" effective engagement with the World beyond our shores. Maybe that was just because the particular problem (Viet Nam, etc...) was not easily definable or properly understood, and "muddle through" an incremental, but limited, strategy was not a path to success.

For me, immediate stability/reconstruction, rather than military/political stuff, is a definable area where positive success can be identified, planned, executed, and obtained. Closing the door of US conflict, as measured by the end of body flow, is, to me, both a positive objective, and, based on Iraq, achievable.

History cruelly shows how unstable endings, like the first run into Iraq, or the WWI settlement against Germany, lay the foundation for future conflicts, and are not really endings at all. But it doesn't look like we can affect that.

At the moment, I have been trying to absorb what I learned about Iraq, and understand what to do about it.

Yesterday, I read part of a book by Michael O'Brien, America's Failure in Iraq, where he venomously assaults the failure in 1991 to "play through" in Iraq while 500,000 troops were on the ground, then, after 2003, the catastrophic "reconstruction" effort. While I might agree with a lot of it, it seems to me that his approach is, in so many ways, neither going to engage or solve....just a venting.

Lately, I am all the more becoming interested in writing a book on Iraq that looks past and around the 2003-2010 episode, and certainly not to engage the military/political "market". In my view, there are plenty of war fighters who should properly tell the heroic and unheroic tales of war, strategy, and personal experience of those. Literature, too, should have some interesting contributions after some of these young soldiers get through college and try their first books.

But that's not my place.

Maybe it is better, first, to engage a bigger public in a more general tale about the background, rich history and challenges about the area (to create a positive context for engagement).

I started with the idea that the background is the frame story against which the US activities are explained. Funny thing is that the more I approach the research and storytelling, the less I see the US activities as important to the story. If that makes any sense????

I'm not at all depressed by the thread you opened, nor trying to figure out the Tomorrow question. I do it every morning.

Steve