The War in Iraq is a labyrinthine mystery of flawed policy wrapped in a grand illusion… an endless cycle of violence and death… moving this way and that… troops on the run, torture, executions, suicide bombings… all reason abandoned from the desert sands to the urban jungle of Baghdad.

Yet, when the Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania stood up in Congress to face the consequences of our pointless actions, he was accused of aiding the enemy. War is most terrible when the reason for fighting is lost in political ambition. Rather, mystery and illusion has upended military strategy, resulting in the chaos of a brutal civil war that stretches on into the blinding darkness of human reason.