"Who's Rumsfeld?"

There are almost no schools, he said. There is almost no medicine. There is little food, and no electricity except from generators. The list went on. No water. No work. Violence. Abductions. Beheadings. Explosions.

His son-in-law had been kidnapped by insurgents seven months ago, he said, and a note the insurgents left said he was abducted for being friendly with American troops. He has not been seen since.

In Baghdad, he said, Iranian-backed death squads were killing Sunni citizens. The country was falling apart.

“You like freedom?” he asked the sergeant. “This kind? This way?”

“No,” Sergeant McKinnon said.

“I think you and I and many people do not like freedom in this way,” he said. “I believe this. I am sure.”

“It is wrong, the American Army coming here. It is wrong.”

He looked at Sergeant McKinnon, who is younger than many of his 14 children. He was trying to draw him out.

“If American Army came here for three months, four months, O.K.” Mr. Menti said. “But now is four years.”

If there were no American military presence in Iraq, he said, there would be no insurgents. One serves as a magnet for the other.

Mr. Menti spoke to the sergeant as if he were an American diplomat, as if he had some influence over the broad sweeps of American foreign policy. The sergeant remained quiet and polite.

“I don’t think he realizes that we’re trying to make this country safer for him,” he said to Lance Corporal Maguire.

“I think he realizes that we’re trying to make it safe, but that the more we stay here the more people come in and make it worse,” Lance Corporal Maguire replied.

They went upstairs, to pack their gear for the next move, planned for after dark, to another house and another night of looking down on the roads, waiting for an insurgent with a bomb to step within range of a rifle shot.

Sergeant McKinnon spoke of the squad’s isolation. “I only found out yesterday that the Saddam trial was over,” he said. “Another Iraqi told me that.”

He turned to the task of planning for the night’s fire support.

Up on the roof, Lance Corporal Maguire mused about the news. Whatever Mr. Rumsfeld’s resignation might eventually mean, it did not matter here yet, and it would not keep them alive tonight.

Another marine, Lance Cpl. Randall D. Webb, was scanning traffic through his rifle scope, worried that they had been spotted and the insurgents would soon know where they were.

“I think they see us,” he said.

“Man, they all see us,” Lance Corporal Maguire said, and lighted another cigarette.


###

 

Thank you sir. You're a gentleman and a scholar. Not necessarily in that order.

 

put up walls and seperate Sunnis & Shiites and Kurds. good fences make good neighbors!

 

An idea that's trying to be sold here in the U.S.

 

one that should be expanded to the whole Mexican border

 

Wow, d_b just gets dumber and dumber by the minute...I didn't think it was possible to be that stupid

 

With him, anything is possible, apparently. Just ask "Aaron".

 

Alley:

The article is not premium content. When you click the link, you get an add for the Times Select stuff (which is free this week also), wait a few seconds and it will roll to the article.

And DB's password likely came from www.bugmenot.com

 

And D_B obviously has no understanding of Robert Frost.