In part, these charges are old, lobbed and maintained by founding editor Pat Buchanan’s more adamant longtime detractors. But the slander endures, most vociferously it would seem, by unreconstructed liberals who never read the magazine and neoconservatives like my arrogant cabmate, who especially abhor the magazine’s founding manifesto:  that the Bush Administration’s war policy was a mistake, and that the political and tactical reaction to 9/11 was and is not only stunningly wrongheaded, but dangerous and motivated by venal special interests that hew not to the U.S constitution nor to the morals and values of an American republic.

Couldn’t one as easily say their own advocacy of endless war against “brown people” in the Middle East and Central Asia – not to mention North and East Africa – is racism on a Global scale? Writers at The Weekly Standard, National Review, The Washington Times and Commentary have been ruthless non-apologists for the indiscriminate killing of non-whites as a means to their ends, from the “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq and the flattening of Fallujah to the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad, today’s drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, and all of the wars’ human repercussions (death, disease, displacement). In their world, these are always treated as time-wasting, politically motivated afterthoughts that merely muddy their own paper-white narrative.

On a micro-level, how can calling what happened at Abu Ghraib (dragging Arab men by leashes, stacking them up naked in a pyramid, beating and turning dogs loose on them) “a small prison scandal” over which the American public got unduly “hysterical,” not be considered racist in some way? Those were among the many remarks Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol made on the air and in writing that urged Americans to recalibrate their outrage downward in the wake of the 2004 revelations.

His cohort at Commentary, Norman Podhoretz, agreed,  downplaying what happened at Abu Ghraib while making it a political issue, accusing the Democrats of going off  “the intellectual and moral rails as to compare the harassment and humiliation of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib—none of whom, so far as anyone then knew, was even maimed, let alone killed—to the horrendous torturing and murdering that had gone on in that same prison under Saddam Hussein or, even more outlandishly, to the Soviet gulag in which many millions of prisoners died.”

Now, Kristol, in an effort, again, to downplay what many are already calling a war crime, has declared U.S Marines urinating on (desecrating) Afghan corpses part of an American military tradition.

But it’s also worth noting that pissing has a distinguished place in American military history. Most famously, General George S. Patton relieved himself in the Rhine on March 24, 1945—and made sure he was photographed doing so. …

It wasn’t just American generals who seemed preoccupied with pissing back in 1945. Three weeks earlier, Winston Churchill had visited the front lines near Jülich. Churchill had long dreamed of urinating on Hitler’s much-vaunted Siegfried Line to show his contempt for Hitler and Nazism…

So perhaps, as Rep. Allen West, once a battalion commander in Iraq, put it last week, all the sanctimonious Obama administration bigwigs “need to chill.” Did Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta really need to speak up at all?

Does Kristol realize he is comparing dead men to a river or a territorial boundary, suggesting these corpses were never human at all?

Kristol and his ilk don’t think much of the Geneva Conventions, so it is almost not worth the breath to remind them that desecrating corpses is in violation of international treaty, but it is also against military law, which means the Marines already recognize such desecration is not heroic, funny, eye-for-an-eye, nor proof of battlefield supremacy. It’s wrong.

Funny how even suggesting such behavior was happening in World War II or even Vietnam is taboo, but today Kristol and his more deranged ideological offspring like Pamela Geller of the popular Atlas Shrugs website, now appear to be cheering it on, even questioning the loyalty and politics of those who don’t.

“I love these Marines,” wrote Geller after the story broke last week. “Perhaps this is the infidel interpretation of the Islamic ritual of washing and preparing the body for burial.”

What a hoot! Even scarier are the comments, some of which suggest that if al Qaeda wants to field an army of bloodthirsty psychos, beheading and dismembering their enemies and desecrating the dead, then our Marines have every right to do it too.

This might sound like a second grade tutorial, but get with the program: that ain’t how it works among evolved, civilized societies, and it’s not what America is supposed to stand for, no matter how much these right-wing fanatics want to squeeze the Old Testament retroactively into the U.S Constitution and all of its founding principles.

From Jon Soltz, war vet and head of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, on Thursday:

 This isn’t the same military that let people like Rep. Allen West go with a slap on the wrist. West, while serving in Iraq, detained and abused a likely innocent Iraqi, shooting a pistol off right next to the Iraqi’s head, after West’s men captured and beat the Iraqi. The military now understands that actions like West’s, or the Marines in the video, directly put our own troops in danger, and that not doling out justice and punishment sets the US Military back, and puts our troops at increased risk.

We, as a nation, have to be 100 percent behind the Pentagon on this, and seek justice in this case. Those who would cheer on the disgusting actions of these Marines, only serve to compound the damage already done by them.

There are no words to express my disgust at the video making the rounds today, of U.S. Marines apparently urinating on the dead bodies of the Taliban. As an Iraq War veteran who works with Iraq and Afghanistan veterans every day, I can truthfully say that the Marines in the video have undermined everything that I and those who served with me tried to do.

Kristol finished his own column by calling the pissing on dead Afghans “foolishness,” not so different than the these-were-only-a-few-bad-apples-get-over-it rhetoric he promulgated after Abu Ghraib.

Meanwhile, since 2002, The American Conservative has endeavored (at risk of its own marginalization in the conservative mainstream) to protest not only the Global War on Terror, but all of the collateral damage that war in the non-white Muslim World has produced:  hundreds of thousands of deaths, the displacement of millions, environmental destruction that could be the cause of birth defects and chronic illness for generations, the detention and torture of countless individuals and the support of despots and tyrannical regimes that kill and oppress so many millions more.

You decide who is the racist.

Iran is playing an important role in the GOP nomination process. It seems that the Republican Party nominees and the media are using proposed policies towards Iran as the metric by which a candidate’s neoconservative credentials can be measured. The nominees range from the explicitly interventionist (Romney, Santorum, Perry), the cautious but vigilant (Huntsman), to the outright noninterventionist (Paul). For Paul his stance on Iran and his perceived ambivalence towards Israel’s existence are two of the major contributing factors towards his unpopularity amongst a significant number of conservatives.

What all of the candidates agree on is the unpleasantness of the Iranian regime. Iran’s appalling human rights record, its ties to the Syrian regime, Hezbollah, and insurgents in Iraq are all just cause for condemnation, as is its nuclear program. What needs to be carefully examined and taken into consideration when formulating a policy on Iran is its capacity to harm the United States and its allies.

The Iranian economy, due in part to sanctions, is struggling. House and food prices are rising. Iran’s government is struggling to maintain its relations with allies, and Europe is looking increasingly more likely to begin restricting Iranian imports. Iran does pose a threat to the wider global economy and Israel through a possible blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and Israel being potentially in range of an Iranian attack.

However these threats are not justification for the sort of actions being proposed by many GOP candidates for the Presidential nomination. The closing of the Strait of Hormuz, while potentially very damaging to the global economy, would be so damaging to Iran’s standing on the global stage, and more importantly to its relationships with countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, that such action is unlikely and spoken of merely as provocation. On the Israel question, it is worth listening to what the Israelis are saying in regards to their own security. As recently as last November, former senior staff at Mossad warned against strikes on Iran, as such strikes would have the potential to drag the Middle East into a regional war, something Israel would like to avoid. The U.S must avoid preemptive military action against Iran, especially if we value the safety of Israel, a country that is more than capable of defending itself if need be.

It is a shame that after the damaging misadventure in Iraq the GOP is still openly talking of first-strike action as policy towards worrying regimes. Iran is a country almost four times the size of Iraq with more than double the population. Serious military engagement with Iran will be difficult and costly. When other options such as open diplomacy and trade, while difficult are still feasible, the sort of interventions being recommended by many in the GOP nomination field must be rejected.

It seems to me that we both agree on the need for those of us who want to reduce the role of government in the economic and social spheres — and who take action to achieve that goal — to apply the same libertarian principles when dealing with government political-military intervention abroad. But we may be addressing different target audiences.

One problem in any discussion about “libertarians” is coming up with a definition of who these guys are anyway. Free-market conservatives? Republican free marketers? Anarchists on the political right and left? Civil libertarians? Members of the libertarian parties? Social-cultural liberals? Randians?  And the list can go on and on.

I admit that my focus has been on what could be referred to as Washington-centric libertarians, those  politicians, officials, activists, pundits, journalists, academics, think tankers, etc. who proclaim their commitment to free-market principles and are trying to influence the policies that are being made in Washington and those who make them.

In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to argue that decisions on foreign policy/national security are made by small political and policy elite in Washington, unlike, say, education and the environmental policies that are affected by a wider public debate. That explains why a small group of neoconservative intellectuals and operators could play such a critical role in forcing the U.S. into a long and costly military intervention in the Middle East.

And my arguments is that for many reasons Washington-centric libertarians have not played a role as countervailing non-interventionist force in this debate. Or worst, some of them have been applying their libertarian principles to help mobilize support for U.S. political-military interventions in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Policy oriented libertarians have been quite successful in shaping some aspects of U.S. regulatory, tax, environmental, and immigration policies — as practitioners in government agencies and Congressional staffs or as analysts, columnists and television pundits. But they have been missing in action when it comes to the foreign policy and national security arenas. So when Republican officials and lawmakers searhc for foreign policy experts or when the media search for foreign policy pundits they take a look at a list that includes neo-conservatives of various persuasions.

Like Justin Raimondo I hope that Dr. Ron Paul becomes the next U.S.president and that more libertarians get elected to public office and I applaud all those who are trying to make that possible. But until that happens there is no reason why libertarians should not form alliances with other policy oriented types or infiltrate congressional staffs as part of an effort to try to influence the foreign policy debate in Washington instead of agreeing to the current informal division of labor under which they are being tasked to do economic and trade policies and the neo-conservatives are in charge of foreign policy/national security.

I have given a great deal of thought to the War in Iraq since President Obama announced that all American troops would be withdrawn at the end of this year after he failed to obtain an extension to the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement signed by former President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. I found myself asking a question I thought I would never pose.

Should Saddam Hussein have stayed in power?

He’s on to something, although he should be asking, “should the United States have invaded Iraq?” Saddam Hussein was a monster, but for all of President Bush’s prattle about the “threat” from Iraq, he was in no position to attack the U.S. and his humiliating capture demonstrated that he had no death wish. Invading Iraq was a foreseeable disaster; but if memory serves, right-wing websites and publications allowed no dissent on the issue when it mattered.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te (sic) atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

The most absurd response comes from Glenn Reynolds, who writes, “Don’t be angry. Understand it for what it is, an admission of impotence from a sad and irrelevant little man. Things haven’t gone the way he wanted lately, his messiah has feet of clay — hell, forget the “feet” part, the clay goes at least waist-high — and it seems likely he’ll have even less reason to like the coming decade than the last, and he’ll certainly have even less influence than he’s had. Thus, he tries to piss all over the people he’s always hated and envied (emphasis added).”

I have long suspected that Reynolds only reads the parts he wants to and this post is further evidence. If we are to presume that he believes that President Obama is Krugman’s “messiah” (he only implies such) then clearly, Reynolds never actually reads the Nobel Prize winning Times columnist. Krugman has never been much of a fan of Obama. In January of 2008, Krugman wrote about Obama’s response to the recession:

The Obama campaign’s initial response to the latest wave of bad economic news was, I’m sorry to say, disreputable: Mr. Obama’s top economic adviser claimed that the long-term tax-cut plan the candidate announced months ago is just what we need to keep the slump from “morphing into a drastic decline in consumer spending.” Hmm: claiming that the candidate is all-seeing, and that a tax cut originally proposed for other reasons is also a recession-fighting measure — doesn’t that sound familiar?

That last sentence is an obvious reference to George W. Bush, which should be enough to dispel the notion that Krugman is some sort of Obama worshiper who has become recently disillusioned.

I won’t resort to the sort of childish taunts (today, at least) that Reynolds uses. I don’t think that he is bitter or jealous of Krugman (though the latter’s status is vastly greater), but I do believe that he cares most about which team has the ball than anything else. While Krugman has been harshly critical of both the Bush and Obama presidencies, Reynolds only became a strong critic of the executive branch on about January, 20 of 2009—back in 2008 when Krugman was fretting about recession, Reynolds was shilling for the Bush White House.

UPDATE: Ron Paul (via Balloon Juice) adds, “We should never forget those in our government who used the worst terrorist attack in our nation’s history as an excuse to launch completely unrelated wars, to do unprecedented damage to Americans’ historic liberties, to run roughshod over the Constitution, and to betray the Founders’ vision by savaging some of our most deeply held values.”

Jon Basil Utley Interview (MP3)

And here’s the stream for the full audio of Senator Graham’s interview with Hunter and WTMA “Morning Buzz” host Richard Todd.

In the first column, in mid-September 2002, I wrote:

“If Providence does not intrude, we will soon launch an imperial war on Iraq with all the ‘On-to-Berlin!’ bravado with which French poilus and British Tommies marched in August 1914. But this invasion will not be the cakewalk neoconservatives predict. …

“(For) what comes after the celebratory gunfire when wicked Saddam is dead? …

“With our MacArthur Regency in Baghdad, Pax Americana will reach apogee. But then the tide recedes, for the one endeavor at which Islamic peoples excel is expelling imperial powers by terror and guerrilla war. They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon. …

“The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.”

And so it came to pass. And as 90 months of war in Iraq come to an end for America, what was won? And what was lost?

To stampede us into war, the neocons told us that Saddam was tied to al-Qaeda and had a role in 9/11, that he had VX gas, botulism, mustard gas, sarin and anthrax, and was acquiring nuclear weapons. What further proof must you have, demanded Condi Rice, “a mushroom cloud over an American city”?

The truth. Saddam had no tie to al Qaeda, no role in 9/11, no chemical weapons, no biological weapons, no nuclear program.

We attacked a nation that did not attack us, did not threaten us and did not want war with us — to strip it of weapons it did not have.

We were misled. We were deceived. We were lied to.

The cost: 4,400 dead, 35,000 wounded, $700 billion sunk.

“Much has changed since that night” we marched into Iraq, said President Obama. “A war to disarm a state became a fight against an insurgency. Terrorism and sectarian warfare threatened to tear Iraq apart. Thousands of Americans gave their lives. Tens of thousands have been wounded. Our relations abroad were strained. Our unity at home was tested.”

Estimates of Iraqi war dead run from 70,000 to 100,000, which means hundreds of thousands of Iraqi widows and orphans. Christians have seen priests murdered, churches burned and half their number driven into exile. Four million Iraqis have left or lost their homes. Two million are in exile, as Baghdad has been cleansed of Sunnis. Al Qaeda was not in Iraq under Saddam. It is there now.

“Time to turn the page,” said President Obama.

How does Iraq turn the page, as we retreat to secure bases and prepare to bring home the last 50,000 troops?

Terrorism has returned. Iraq’s casualties are back up to where they were before the U.S. surge. Electricity is off much of the time. Six months after elections, no government exists. The Iraqi dead, wounded, widowed, orphaned, homeless and exiled are surely not better off.

What about those we leave behind? What happens to Iraqis who worked with us when we leave? How did our Vietnamese friends fare? What kind of future will Iraqis have, if civil and sectarian war return?

That our soldiers, Marines, diplomats and aid workers did their jobs bravely and honorably is understood by their countrymen — and attested to by the fact the U.S. military is the most respected of our institutions.

But was the war worth it? Some 72 percent of Americans said in a recent CBS poll that it was not worth the price in U.S. war dead.

What does the secretary of defense think?

“It really requires a historian’s perspective in terms of what happens here in the long run,” says Robert Gates. “How it all weighs in the balance over time remains to be seen.” A seven-year war, and our minister of defense cannot declare that it was all worth it.

But if America is not a certain winner from this war, who is?

Iran saw its great enemy Saddam removed and its Shia allies come to power in Baghdad. Osama bin Laden saw America bled by wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and perhaps Iran, as al-Qaeda has spread to Yemen, Somalia and North Africa.

And as America was tied down in the Long War, China emerged as the world’s No. 1 auto producer, No. 1 manufacturer, No. 1 exporter and No. 2 economy.

Meanwhile, the Washington Times reports,

“The federal government has posted signs along a major interstate highway in Arizona, more than 100 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, warning travelers the area is unsafe because of drug and alien smugglers, and a local sheriff says Mexican drug cartels now control some parts of the state.”

What does it profit America if we save Anbar and lose Arizona?

Patrick Buchanan is the author, most recently, of Churchill, Hitler, and ‘The Unnecessary War,’ now available in paperback. COPYRIGHT 2010 Creators.com.

After seven-plus years, Operation Iraqi Freedom has concluded. Operation New Dawn, its name suggesting a skin cream or dishwashing liquid, now begins. (What ever happened to the practice of using terms like Torch or Overlord or Dragoon to describe military campaigns?) Although something like 50,000 U.S. troops remain in Iraq, their mission is not to fight, but simply to advise and assist their Iraqi counterparts. In another year, if all goes well, even this last remnant of an American military presence will disappear.

So the Americans are bowing out, having achieved few of the ambitious goals articulated in the heady aftermath of Baghdad’s fall. The surge, now remembered as an epic feat of arms, functions chiefly as a smokescreen, obscuring a vast panorama of recklessness, miscalculation, and waste that politicians, generals, and sundry warmongers are keen to forget.

Back in Iraq, meanwhile, nothing has been resolved and nothing settled. …  As the United States removes itself from the scene, Iraqis will avail themselves of the opportunity to decide their own fate, a process almost certain to be rife with ethnic, sectarian, and tribal bloodletting. What the outcome will be, no one can say with certainty, but it won’t be pretty.

Lather, rinse, repeat in Afghanistan…

The two wars of the past decade have ostensibly been fought as part of larger War on Terror. But the conditions the U.S. will eventually leave behind in both places promise to be virtually indistinguishable from those that gave rise to the Afghan Taliban in the first place. In Afghanistan, that’s no change at all, and in Iraq that’s a change for the worse, at least as far as U.S. interests are concerned. With nation-building wars, victory is the identical twin of defeat.

Muqtada al Sadr, once dismissed by Washington neoconservatives as a desperate, washed-up five-cent firebrand, is now an Iranian-supported kingmaker who will not only help determine the next government and prime minister, but has threatened to activate the armed wing of his low-lying Mahdi Army, the Promised Day Brigade, if the American “occupier” doesn’t pack up and leave entirely.

The “Promised Day Brigade” will “prepare quietly to launch qualitative attacks against the occupiers (U.S. forces) if they stay beyond 2011,” said Sadr spokesman Salah al-Obeidi, to the Associated Press, in May. “It will have a big role to play to drive them out of Iraq.”

Read on to find out just how al-Sadr might complicate the nice, neat narrative Barack Obama tries to weave tonight.

Not in Clinton’s speech, nor in the document itself,  were there references to, or examples of, military or diplomatic accomplishments in Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan, probably because it might be uncomfortable to make up such things in the absence of any long-term stability, peace or prosperity in any of these countries after nearly a decade and over 5,485 U.S lives lost in the trying. In fact, the political situation is imploding in Iraq and the first real test of the “whole of government” or WOG approach in Marjah has been pretty much ruled a bust in Afghanistan by people who know.

Of course the National Security Strategy is a congressionally-mandated exercise that is supposed to be a working blueprint for the President’s vision moving forward. But the formula for achieving something in Iraq and Afghanistan reads like a shopworn, two-page brochure: deny al Qaeda safe havens, minimize the influence of the Taliban, strengthen the central government, work with international and regional partners and hopefully start withdrawing troops by the imposed July 2011 deadline. The same with Iraq: help stand up their country as much as possible in order to transition the hell out of there.

Nothing new or exceptional here. And it is really hard to engage in the rest of it (56 pages total) with such stale invocations, talking about our country’s “military superiority” and our “responsibility” to “strengthen and apply American leadership” with a shift to comprehensive yet “soft” power abroad, in order to advance global cooperation, democracy and peace in a broad and effective “international order” based on universal values of human rights and dignity. All too familiar messaging, just slightly tweaked for the new liberal internationalist administration and completely taken out of the context that we have virtually taken a bulldozer to two countries and have been bombing another (Pakistan) daily through two U.S administrations.

But yet Clinton’s kindred spirits at the Center for a New American Security (the house where COIN lives) were nodding in agreement, though nothing in the advancement of their vaunted “Petraeus Doctrine” has yet seen fruition. I got a press release with a series of well-versed reactions to the document just as it was released. Just a taste from CNAS President John Nagl, who has been called the “Johnny Appleseed of COIN”:

“The Obama Administration’s National Security Strategy displays an impressive understanding of the new threats and challenges America faces in this new century. It recognizes that America is stronger when it fights alongside its allies and helps our partners build their own capacity to combat the threats we share – from Al Qaeda to climate change to cyber attacks. Building our partners’ capabilities can help prevent wars and is the key to victory when we do have to fight.”

I’m glad we got all that figured out. They don’t call it a think tank for nothing.

It’s amazing how a political faction, so steeped in sanctimony about “honoring our troops,” can turn heel and sprint away at the first sight of war’s true devastation. Let me amend that — at the first of sight of anything politically inconvenient to their aggressive interventionist worldview. What indeed are they afraid of? That their distortions, manipulations and embellishments about the glories of war will be revealed so achingly in the soldier hanging by a noose in his parents’ modest middle American home?

If so, there is bound to be another blackout on this most recent report. Good thing it’s coming from the Military Times, so as to at least ensure that the story itself will be circulated well within the military and beyond on both sides of the spectrum. And it will be that much harder for the right wing talkers to trash on its face.

Turns out the government has spent upwards of $1 billion on “common pain and psychiatric medications” for soldiers from 2001 to 2009. The military is drugging up soldiers more than ever –  76 percent more than at the start of the two-front war — and in doing so, keep them in the ranks, in the field, behind .50-caliber machine guns and engaging in patrols, despite physical and emotional pain, depression and post traumatic stress likely held-over from previous tours in-country.

One wonders how far the military will go to keep warm bodies in the warzone.

The Military Times report, published a week ago, tries to answer the question and what it finds is nothing less than staggering :

Troops and military health care providers also told Military Times that these medications are being prescribed, consumed, shared and traded in combat zones — despite some restrictions on the deployment of troops using those drugs.

The investigation also shows that drugs originally developed to treat bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are now commonly used to treat symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, such as headaches, nightmares, nervousness and fits of anger….

Antidepressants and anticonvulsants are the most common mental health medications prescribed to service members. Seventeen percent of the active-duty force, and as much as 6 percent of deployed troops, are on antidepressants, Brig. Gen. Loree Sutton, the Army’s highest-ranking psychiatrist, told Congress on Feb. 24.

In contrast, about 10 percent of all Americans take antidepressants, according to a 2009 Columbia University study.

The reporters’ analysis mirrors results from a survey taken of some 28,000 active duty soldiers and Marines and published in December 2009. In that Pentagon assessment, one in four troops admitted to abusing prescription medication — mostly painkillers — in a one-year period; as many as 20 percent of Marines said they too, had abused pills. Two percent of those surveyed said they had thoughts of suicide, and 60 percent of Marines said they had engaged in binge drinking over the course of the year.

The Military Times article goes farther, breaking down the actual medications of choice:

* Antipsychotic medications, including Seroquel and Risperdal, spiked most dramatically — orders jumped by more than 200 percent, and annual spending more than quadrupled, from $4 million to $16 million.

* Use of anti-anxiety drugs and sedatives such as Valium and Ambien also rose substantially; orders increased 170 percent, while spending nearly tripled, from $6 million to about $17 million.

* Antiepileptic drugs, also known as anticonvulsants, were among the most commonly used psychiatric medications. Annual orders for these drugs increased about 70 percent, while spending more than doubled, from $16 million to $35 million.

* Antidepressants had a comparatively modest 40 percent gain in orders, but it was the only drug group to show an overall decrease in spending, from $49 million in 2001 to $41 million in 2009, a drop of 16 percent. The debut in recent years of cheaper generic versions of these drugs is likely responsible for driving down costs.

Worse, is the description of how the drugs are prescribed seemingly on the fly and for things they have not been tested for, and how they are eventually used in unpredictable “cocktails,” encouraging suicidal thoughts, hyper-aggression or making the user feel like some kind of extra from the movie Dawn of the Dead.

Other side effects cited by troops who used such drugs in the war zones include slowed reaction times, impaired motor skills, and attention and memory problems.

One 35-year-old Army sergeant first class said he was prescribed the anticonvulsant Topamax to prevent the onset of debilitating migraines. But the drug left him feeling mentally sluggish, and he stopped taking it.

“Some people call it ‘Stupamax’ because it makes you stupid,” said the sergeant, who asked not to be identified because he said using such medication carries a social stigma in the military.

Being slow — or even “stupid” — might not be a critical problem for some civilians. But it can be deadly for troops working with weapons or patrolling dangerous areas in a war zone, said Dr. John Newcomer, a psychiatry professor at Washington University in St. Louis and a former fellow at the American Psychiatric Association.

One veteran interviewed for the story recalled his brief brush with suicide — the result of new antidepressants he was put on during combat duty:

Spc. Mike Kern enlisted in 2006 and spent a year deployed in 2008 with the 4th Infantry Division as an armor crewman, running patrols out of southwest Baghdad.

Kern went to the mental health clinic suffering from nervousness, sleep problems and depression. He was given Paxil, an antidepressant that carries a warning label about increased risk for suicide.

A few days later, while patrolling the streets in the gunner’s turret of a Humvee, he said he began having serious thoughts of suicide for the first time in his life.

“I had three weapons: a pistol, my rifle and a machine gun,” Kern said. “I started to think, ‘I could just do this and then it’s over.’ That’s where my brain was: ‘I can just put this gun right here and pull the trigger and I’m done. All my problems will be gone.’”

Kern said the incident scared him, and he did not take any more drugs during that deployment. But since his return, he has been diagnosed with PTSD and currently takes a variety of psychotropic medications.

This all reminded me of an outstanding series written by Dave Philipps at the Colorado Springs Gazette last year. In it, he profiled members of the 4th Infantry Division’s 4th Brigade Combat Team, otherwise known as “the bloody brigade.” Stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado, the brigade had taken disproportionate numbers of casualties in Iraq, being there at the peak of the post-invasion violence in 2005 and then again during the surge in 2007. In between, members of the unit were accused of a spree of violent behavior within the community off-base, including brawls, beatings, rapes, DUIs, drug deals, domestic violence, shootings, stabbings and kidnapping. The murder rate among Fort Carson soldiers overall was 114 times the rate of Colorado Springs and 20 times the rate of young males nationwide.

A common thread among the young men profiled by Philipps was not just their arrest records, but their abuse of pain killers and anti-depressants.

In one exchange, vet Anthony Marquez explains his condition:

Marquez started destroying himself with the pills that were supposed to help him.

For his injuries, he said, doctors at Evans prescribed him 90 morphine pills, 90 Percocets, and five fentanyl patches every three weeks.

“They were for pain,” he said. “And I still had pain. But, mostly, I was using them to get high.”

He could not get Iraq out of his head. Doctors prescribed antidepressants and sleeping pills, but he said they didn’t help. He was saving up Percocet, then downing a handful on an empty stomach.

He said he started trading his morphine with other soldiers for an antipsychotic called quetiapine and an anti-anxiety drug called clonazepam. Improper use of either can cause psychotic reactions, anxiety, panic attacks, aggressiveness and suicidal behavior, but, Marquez said, injured soldiers traded them like children in a lunchroom swapping desserts.

“It was real common among the guys who were hurt,” Marquez said.

At one point, Marquez said, he ate his three-week supply of meds in half the time, then went back to Evans claiming he had lost his pills.

He said a doctor told him security measures prevented him from giving Marquez more narcotics, but he could write the soldier a paper prescription he could fill in Colorado Springs.

Marquez agreed.

Then there’s veteran and convicted accessory to murder,Kenneth Eastridge, who was all but 24-years-old and in prison at the time the series was published last August. Wiped out on pills for PTSD and a felony warrant out for his arrest (he was accused of sticking a gun in his girlfriend’s face), the Army still sent him back into Iraq for a second tour in 2007.  Known for having the “most kills” of anyone in his unit, Eastridge described his much-awaited return to the warzone:

At first, Eastridge said, he enjoyed the intensity of it. He had a competition going with Bressler to see who could kill more bad guys. His final count, he said — and his sergeant confirmed — was about 80.

But after a few months, the raids, gore and constant threat of roadside bombs started to get to him. He couldn’t sleep. He was on edge all the time. Doctors at the base diagnosed him with PTSD, depression, anxiety and a sleep disorder. They gave him antidepressants and sleeping pills and put him back on duty.

When he went back to the doctors a few weeks later saying the pills were not working, his medical records show, they doubled his dose.

When I was going back to the series today I noted with despair that one of the men featured in the series, John Needham, had died in February from an apparent adverse reaction to medication he was taking in the wake of a recent back surgery. Needham,25, once described as a happy-go-lucky California surfing champion, was one of the “bloody brigade’s” tragedies: he saw nasty combat in Iraq, and was prescribed things like Zoloft when he thought he was “losing it,” before being promptly returned to duty by Army field doctors. After the sixth IED attack, he got drunk and tried to shoot himself in the head. He was returned home to Walter Reed with a belly full of stories about atrocities he said he saw committed by fellow soldiers and officers.  His father said the Army wanted to eventually return him to duty overseas, but his family fought for the troubled boy’s discharge. “Groggy and vacant from pills,” he suffered from severe flashbacks, though the VA refused him inpatient care. Such was his condition when he was accused of beating his ex-girlfriend to death during a fight, his father told The Gazette. Needham had also been profiled in Salon’s heartbreaking “Coming Home” series, which is ongoing on their website.

There is so much to absorb here. The Military Times report indicates more than a few sordid things — that the military is knowingly rotating sick soldiers into combat under the influence of powerful painkillers, anti-depressants and other psychotropic drugs, some of which have been negligently prescribed and/or are being used as part of a mindblowing cocktail of other drugs. Second, the pharmaceutical companies are really cleaning up, just like they do in the civilian world. Thirdly, if all goes as planned, we will have some 100,000 troops in Afghanistan and at least (if draw-downs go as planned), another 50,000 in Iraq by the end of the summer. So the military wins another round at faking out the “Army is broken” meme. But one wonders how many of these soldiers and Marines are on their second, third, fourth tours, or how many pills it takes them to get through the day. Seems as though they are the real losers in this equation. But how long can it all last?

So the American government bungled the case. This will no doubt cause a firestorm on the Baghdad streets, but at this point, since they are in the rear-view, their cries will be no more than a vague whisper here in the States. I mean, the Afghans are getting restive after a series of NATO airstrikes allegedly killed upwards of 20 innocent Afghans this week, but no one is talking about it here, and we’re supposedly paying attention to that war.

As for Blackwater, it gets quite a New Year’s “clean slate” — the chances are slim, reportedly, that U.S prosecutors will launch a successful appeal in the Nisoor case. Everyone seems to acknowledge Blackwater’s global war operations (now under the moniker “Xe” and new management) have been crooked as a dog’s hind leg, but Blackwater/Xe, thanks to brilliant connections in Washington, including former CIA, military and current purse string holders on the Hill, always seems to land on it’s feet. It’s not like Nisoor was hobbling Xe’s action anyway: aside from staying in Baghdad despite an Iraqi government ban, and its secret U.S-funded endeavors in Pakistan, Xe is poised for more lucrative and (less covert) contracts training Afghan security personnel. If Afghan cops are already considered more despicable than the Taliban in large swaths of the  country …well, one gets the point.

So Happy New Year to Blackwater/Xe and all of the war profiteers who enjoy lush war-generated employment opportunities while the rest of us look towards 2010 with a mixed measure of trepidation and hope, and the people of Iraq wave us goodbye with no doubt an even more acute sense of trepidation, and a little less hope.

This is Iraq, September 2009. As The Associated Press reported last night, criminal elements, typically former insurgents, are taking the cities hostage once again, physically and emotionally. They are targeting children, the most vulnerable, as the photos of the missing now paper the landscape’s already bomb-blasted walls.

As the worst of the country’s sectarian bloodshed ebbs, Iraqis now face a new threat to getting on with their lives: a frenzy of violent crime.

Many of those involved are believed to be battle-experienced former insurgents unable to find legitimate work. They often bring the same brutality to their crimes that they showed in the fighting that nearly pushed the country into a Sunni-Shiite civil war in 2006 and 2007.

The result has been a wave of thefts and armed robberies, hitting homes, cars, jewelry stores, currency exchanges, pawn shops and banks.

Kidnapping, too, remains terrifyingly common, as it was during the peak of the insurgency. Now, however, the targets are increasingly children, and the kidnappers, rather than having sectarian motives, are seeking ransoms.

In southern Baghdad’s Saydiyah neighborhood, photos of missing children are pasted on electricity poles and the concrete blast walls that enclose many areas of the bomb-battered capital.

Surfing the online analyses of  Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s ultimatum to President Obama, which in essence is, “give me more troops or we will fail in Afghanistan,” I see that the response falls into two camps: those who do not think the ultimatum is particularly helpful, and those who commend the good general for laying it on the line. Those in the latter no doubt include neoconservative consultants to McChrystal, like Ms. Kimberly Kagan and husband Fred Kagan, who have been pushing for a Iraq-style “surge” of more troops into Afghanistan for a almost year now.

Kagan, author of “The Surge: A Military History” has often lobbed hubris-filled dismissives at writers who dared to question the Surge she and her husband helped to orchestrate on the policy side for the Bush Administration in 2006. To her mind, she has already been vindicated, leaving no doubt that the same “strategy” should be applied in Afghanistan. Because, as she, husband Kagan and fellow war hawk Max Boot pointed out last March, major cities like Kabul and Jalalabad “are relatively safe and flourishing,” and “there is no question that we can succeed against these much weaker foes.”

This struggle is not just about Afghanistan. It is also about tracking and effecting what is going on in Pakistan’s tribal areas. That is where the global Qaeda leadership is…

From their positions across the border in Afghanistan, American forces can literally see these areas. They can also gather invaluable intelligence from, and spread our influence to, the tribes that straddle the frontier. But we get that vantage point only as long as we have something to offer the Afghans — security, improved quality of life, hope for a better government.

To them, it’s crystal clear. It was then, when the three made those statements in The New York Times, and now, as the Obama Administration stands on the precipice of a quagmire.

In 2007, Kimberly Kagan blasted reporters who had traveled to Iraq to get a sense of the Surge. Kagan was not surprisingly proprietary, and took special umbrage at Washington Post writer Sadarsan Raghavan, who called the city of Dora a “Potemkin Village” staged to make scribes warm up to the magic of the Surge. It was a “new low” in the day’s reporting, Kagan charged. Any clear-thinking reporter with enough sense would see how successful the nine battalions that came to Dora to “clear, hold and build” really were in making it “a symbol of the success that is possible when we persevere in the right approach in Iraq.”

Today, Dora, like many of Iraq’s population centers, is feeling the backhand of a government that is riddled with corruption, a dysfunctional political system and worst of all, a culture that is too degraded to defend herself.

In August, two gunmen in their 20s broke into a neighbor’s house in Baghdad’s southern Dora district, beheading a father and his 1-year-old daughter and severely injuring her mother and another child. They stole 5 million Iraqi dinars, or about $4,300, and some jewelry.

They were arrested the next day. One of them was a former soldier who left the Iraqi army seven months ago.

This isn’t the first such analysis to come out of Iraq (like anyone is still paying attention). In fact, this is what The Economist had to say earlier this month:

Old habits from Saddam Hussein’s era are becoming familiar again. Torture is routine in government detention centres. “Things are bad and getting worse, even by regional standards,” says Samer Muscati, who works for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based lobby. His outfit reports that, with American oversight gone (albeit that the Americans committed their own shameful abuses in such places as Abu Ghraib prison), Iraqi police and security people are again pulling out fingernails and beating detainees, even those who have already made confessions. A limping former prison inmate tells how he realised, after a bout of torture in a government ministry that lasted for five days, that he had been relatively lucky. When he was reunited with fellow prisoners, he said he saw that many had lost limbs and organs.

What seems to be emerging by day is an ugly truth — that the Surge was successful in that it provided a short-term solution, a Band-Aid for the outgoing Bush Administration. A temporary fix heartily embraced by the Obama Administration, which did not want to be responsible for Bush’s War. But President Obama has his own war now, and his first misstep was to allow the architects of the Band-Aid to bully him around while they experimented with Afghanistan.

While it may be painful, Mr. President – and looking at that photo of Moshim certainly is — wouldn’t it be wise to really look back at what its wrought before giving the Surge the green light in Afghanistan, too?