One Young American Solider

I saw a thoroughly impressive young man on "60 Minutes" last night, Bush. I didn't catch his name, but he was, I believe, a lieutenant in the US Army, a recent graduate from Westpoint. Obviously well educated and articulate, he spoke with intelligence and engaging sensitivity about his tours of duty in Iraq--which involved not only battlefield command, but also jobs for which his training had left him surprisingly well prepared: acting as de facto mayor of a city, for example, in which normal services had been disrupted by the war. He spoke with restrained depth of feeling about the loss of two of the men in his command, and what it meant to have to communicate the loss of these two "brothers" to their families back home. If this is the caliber of men and women graduating from the military academy, I have to respect the education they're receiving.

The heartbreaker for me, though, Bush, is to know that men and women like this are sacrificing their lives to support an ideology that does not serve the interests of this country or the world at large. Asked whether he felt the need to discuss the purpose of the war we're fighting with his troops, the young officer readily conceded that this was a daily necessity--to have answers to fundamental, pressing questions about what we're doing in Iraq. His current argument, it seems, it that it's essential to "finish what we started." His interviewer did not push on to the next question--perhaps an unfair or imponderable one: did we do right to have started it in the first place?

Well, yes, he's right, in one important sense. Reason persuades me that we can't just walk out and leave the mess that we have created. And yet... Forget the weapons of mass destruction. Forget the false premise that Saddam Hussein was in some way responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center towers. Forget the absurd notion that Iraq presented an imminent threat to the United States. Forget even the noble cause of removing an obviously evil dictator. What we're left with, Bush, as you so often remind us, is the liberation of an oppressed people and the spread of democracy. The problem that remains, if we're to "finish what we started," is a cultural and historical one that we are hopelessly unqualified to address: the current bloody chaos--which you dismiss all too lightly, in my view, as the work of a few malcontents--increasingly appears to be no more nor less than the latest manifestation of the centuries-old struggle between Shiite and Sunni. "Liberation", in this instance, served only to open up a deep and ancient wound that no amount of American military might can heal. Democracy, as your pal Vladimir Putin noted in another segment of "Sixty Minutes" last night, can only be the internal business of the country involved. It cannot be implanted by intervention from outside, particularly by military invasion. He was forthright in his opinion that you had committed an error of historical proportions, and I imagine that he was not shy about telling you the same. (Did you have a good dinner, by the way?)

Anyway, it won't surprise you in the least to know that I happen to agree with Putin on this point. But the fact that I disagree so fundamentally with his commander in chief does not prevent me from being impressed by our young lieutenant. I just wish we could see him serve in a wiser, less ideologically-driven cause.