Which Side Are You ON

We have seen the story so often from Iraq that only someone who has not been reading the news or chose to be ignorant these past, what, four years would consider Michael Kamber's piece on the impossibility of knowing your enemy in today's New York Times new. The story is an important reminder, to be sure, of the absurdity of a war in which the enemy frequently wears the uniform of the Iraqi Army--our putative ally--or serves in the puppet government we preserve and maintain at considerable cost in blood and treasure, but it's as new as the obligatory story from every new reporter in the Paris bureau about dog shit on the sidewalks of that wonderful city, which is to say stale. The Iraq story is more lethal, though, and more depressing, because the war continues in defiance of the will of people everywhere, including here. To paraphrase Pogo, we have met the enema, and he are our leaders, Bush and Cheney.