Support Your Troops (and pull out only in stages...)

"When you go back to Camp Lejeune (in North Carolina), these will be the good old days, when you brought ... death and destruction to - what is this place called?"

A Marine answered in the darkness: "Haqlaniyah."

Estrada continued: "Haqlaniyah, yeah, that. And then we will take death and destruction to Haditha. Hopefully, we'll stay until December so we can bring death and destruction to half of Iraq."

The flatbed truck erupted in a storm of "Hoo-ahs."

Seen here. Support your troops, you support this. Want staged withdrawal, you want more of this.

Elsewhere, after the now familiar stuff about insufficient armour and a quagmire obvious to a soldier in Iraq:

As disturbing as those reports were, what Kulick had to say about the conduct of the war was even more troubling. He told his family that the Iraqi police "were corrupt and inept and there was no way they could ever train them to the degree where they could keep order." And when his unit went out after insurgents, far too many innocent iraqis were killed in the crossfire. And, Kulick reported home, "the more hate that created." When the Americans left an area, the insurgents came back the next day.

Eventually, when Kulick saw Iraqi citizens kneeling in the street in prayer, his interpreter would tell him they were praying for the Americans to leave. "They would rather live with evil they knew rather than live with us," Kulick said in his emails. "We were killing them as much as the insurgents were."

They were actually killing them more than the insurgents. John Kulick was one of the four Pennsylvania National Guards killed 9 August in an IED blast near Beiji, Iraq.