Six years ago tomorrow my alarm clock, set to NPR news, delivered me into a waking nightmare.

Sometimes I am still convinced it must be a bad dream – its hard to believe we squandered the outpouring of world support, mired ourselves in a pointless war when we should have given the Middle East a taste of freedom through education, through helping build infratsructure, through immersing them in education instead of bombs.
I wrote an article entitled “Thoughts About Insurgent Warfare” three years ago – that’s halfway between then and now. It could have been written today. Except the casualty numbers would be higher.

General Petraeus’s comments seem odd coming basically on the anniversary of the long war.

It has been a long war.

I expect Bush will tell us we need to keep the death going another year or more. That will be part of his September 11th speech.

I’m going to two events tomorrow. One is in the morning at City Hall to formally remember the heroic firefighters and policemen who died. They are still heroes, and still senselessly dead. And then I’m going to an anti-war protest in the evening in Marina Park.

Maybe I’ll see some of you at one or the other event. We’re up to 3,761 or so dead and 27,000 or so wounded Americans. I’ve seen estimated Iraqi body counts from in the 70 thousands to seven hundred thousand. Funny how we don’t count the whole cost.