August 24, 2005 - There will come a day, whether in four more years or a decade, when the troops come home. There will come a day on which some will declare again a mission accomplished and the drip of blood to nourish desert flowers will cease to flow. On that day Iraq and Afghanistan will commence to recede into the mists of memory and in a generation old men will sit nodding at the holograph projector and tell their grandsons of the way it was back then. Casey Sheehan will be just as dead. Jessica Lynch, an old woman now, will lean on her cane and speak of the time when she was America’s heroine in a work of fiction wrought because the President needed someone to cheer for and the Army would give it to him.

Old men will then remember when the President abjured them to “finish the mission” without ever telling them just what the mission was. They will speak of alley ways and lonely desert paths suddenly blossoming in flame as new recruits in ones and twos fell in to join the ranks of the regiment of the slain. They will tell of phantom weapons and terrible threats that never were and brag that they disarmed a tyrant of arms he never had. They will speak of vengeance exacted for another’s crime and describe how they changed a regime and made a nescient democracy into a theocratic hub of a revived axis of evil renewed in its determination to resist an American hegemony. They will tell how they were there at the creation of the new Persian Empire astride the Persian Gulf.

How can we know when the mission is finished when the Commander-in-Chief cannot tell us what the mission is? Can the fact be that the President doesn’t describe the parameters of the mission because he doesn’t know himself what objective he has sent 150,000 American men and women to achieve? Can it be that from the beginning the War in Iraq had been a deployment in search of a mission? Does the President refuse to sit down with Cindy Sheehan and answer her question because he does not know why her son had to die? Will there come a day when the President will learn what the mission was; when history will tell him why they were there?