Bedazzled by Stars

It seems that as long as someone has stars on their lapel, their word gets taken as gospel truth. It just seems to me that there's too big of a bubble placed around diplomats and top brass for them to get any real idea of what the deal is. Instead of listening to them, maybe we should start taking the word of actual soldiers at face value. I know many of them think things are working, and I certainly can't contradict them from my apartment in Cambridge. But I can offer the view of people like Alex Horton who make a lot of sense. Maybe the soldiers who say they're making a difference and we've "turned the corner" in Iraq are right. I'd love to believe it, because whatever the reactionaries say, no American has a defeatist agenda except the sleeper cells. No one wants to see Iraq end up as another failed state. But then, there might not be anything we can do about it. Improvement in isolated areas is not enough.