Some of them -- Robert Heinlein’s "Stranger in a Strange Land" -- were comically of their time: that novel’s vision of the good life seemed to owe an awful lot to the Playboy Mansion in its prime, only with telepathy and being nice added in. Frank Herbert’s "Dune" had similarly sixties social mores, but its vision of an intergalactic world of disciplined desert jihadis and a great game for the substance that made all long-distance transit possible is even more relevant now.  Think: drug cartels meet the oil industry in the deep desert.

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The newest conservative myth is that the upheavals in the Middle East — called the Arab Spring but occurring too in non-Arab countries like Iran — are a result of the Iraq War. The “freedom” that George W. Bush brought to Iraq had a domino effect on other countries in the region, the argument goes. Neocon Robert Kagan told Salon recently that “there were repeated free elections in Iraq and that undoubtedly had some effect on how neighboring people views their government.” Said Kagan: “I think Egyptians said. ‘If the Iraqis can have elections, why can’t we have elections?’”

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Wait a minute: that’s the WikiLeaks “Collateral Murder” video!  The gunsight view of an Apache helicopter opening fire from half a mile high on a crowd of Iraqis -- a few armed men, but mostly unarmed civilians, including a couple of Reuters employees -- as they unsuspectingly walked the streets of a Baghdad suburb one July day in 2007.

Watch, if you can bear it, as the helicopter crew blows people away, killing at least a dozen of them, and taking good care to wipe out the wounded as they try to crawl to safety.  (You can also hear the helicopter crew making wisecracks throughout.) When a van comes on the scene to tend to the survivors, the Apache gunship opens fire on it too, killing a few more and wounding two small children.

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In some 24 years of government service, I experienced my share of dissonance when it came to what was said in public and what the government did behind the public’s back. In most cases, the gap was filled with scared little men and women, and what was left unsaid just hid the mistakes and flaws of those anonymous functionaries.

What I saw while serving the State Department at a forward operating base in Iraq was, however, different. There, the space between what we were doing (the eye-watering waste and mismanagement), and what we were saying (the endless claims of success and progress), was filled with numb soldiers and devastated Iraqis, not scaredy-cat bureaucrats.

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His death is not just a terrible loss to journalism: it is a loss to America. Even though the United States is at war with two Middle Eastern countries, and stands on the brink of war with a third, most Americans, including our politicians and many so-called “experts,” know almost nothing about it – which is one of the reasons we embarked upon the disastrous Iraq war. Like all great reporters, Shadid penetrated the darkness. He took us not just into streets and cafes, but into hearts and minds. He showed the impact of decisions made by politicians and generals in far-away lands on housewives and young girls and street vendors, on small human beings just trying to live decent lives. He was our eyes.

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It was the Iraq War, and we were the uninvited guests who didn’t want to go home.  To the last second, despite President Obama’s repeated promise that all American troops were leaving, despite an agreement the Iraqi government had signed with George W. Bush’s administration in 2008, America’s military commanders continued to lobby and Washington continued to negotiate for 10,000 to 20,000 U.S. troops to remain in-country as advisors and trainers.

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Any time someone who was the best at something dies, the world shrinks a little bit. It feels smaller today. One part of it especially feels smaller -- the world of words. For Christopher Hitchens was a virtuoso of language. As a baby, Mozart supposedly could tell if a violin was microscopically out of tune. I imagine Hitchens lying in his crib, wailing because his mother did not use a subordinate clause in exactly the right way to modulate to her conclusion. He was a rhetorical freak.

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Upon the death of the unlamented Earl Butz, Hitchens excoriated editors who published sanitized obituaries of a man remembered solely for a vulgar racist remark made in public. Hitchens leaves a rather more varied legacy, but it's just as important not to whitewash his role in recent history.

There was no more forceful intellectual voice in support of the Iraq War than Hitchens. There were others who were more prominent, more influential or more persuasive, but Hitchens was the perfect shill for an administration looking to cast its half-baked invasion plans as a morally righteous intervention, because only he could call upon a career of denunciations of totalitarianism and defenses of human rights. (The fact that the war was supposed to be justified by weapons Saddam was supposedly developing didn't really matter to Hitchens.)

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One of the memorable slogans of the Vietnam era was “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” Today, the question should be: What if they ended a war and nobody cared?

With the possible exception of the Korean War, never in U.S. history has a major war concluded with so little fanfare. Every schoolchild knows that the Revolutionary War ended at Yorktown, when Gen. Cornwallis’ troops surrendered to George Washington’s Continental Army as a British band famously played “The World Turned Upside Down.” The encounter at Appomattox Court House between an immaculate Robert E. Lee and a mud-spattered Ulysses S. Grant has entered American legend.

V-E and V-J Days, commemorating the end of World War II, set off the most joyous, raucous and heartfelt celebrations in U.S. history. Even our defeats are marked in memory: The end of the Vietnam War will forever be associated with the image of desperate South Vietnamese clinging to the last helicopter as it lifted off from the American Embassy in Saigon.

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Back up for a long shot, however, and a different fact vs. fiction dilemma comes into focus: Is Chalabi, that consummate politician and schemer, a scoundrel or a hero? That's a question that Richard Bonin's new book, "Arrows of the Night: Ahmad Chalabi's Long Journey to Triumph in Iraq," probes with wincing persistence.

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Horrifying as these statistics are, imagine how much more disgusted you would be if a foreign power actually did vaporize those cities, and then followed up that annihilation by having its leading politicians and pundits demand that Americans pay reparations for the privilege of experiencing such devastation.

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The Obama administration plans to bolster the American military presence in the Persian Gulf after it withdraws the remaining troops from Iraq this year, according to officials and diplomats. That repositioning could include new combat forces in Kuwait...

In addition to negotiations over maintaining a ground combat presence in Kuwait, the United States is considering sending more naval warships through international waters in the region.

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If ever there were a complete foreign policy disaster, it has been the Iraq war. Most foreign policy failures are imperfect idiocy. At least elements of the failed policy made sense at the time. By invading Iraq, the U.S. carried idiocy to perfection. The Iraq war was a catastrophe for the United States in every way—strategic, economic, political and moral.

Strategic. From the end of the Gulf War in February 1991 to the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, the U.S. pursued a policy of “dual containment” of Iran and Iraq. Though far less costly than the invasion of Iraq would prove to be, this dual containment policy was expensive, in part because of the cost of U.S. occupation of part of Iraq and frequent bombing of the territory that Saddam still held.

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Here's the excerpted exchange that kicked it off; I introduced the subject and then P.J. Crowley, my former colleague at the Center for American Progress, fired back (there was a break in between, so I've put the two statements together for brevity's sake):

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George W. Bush, of course, notoriously announced an end to combat operations in Iraq in 2003 aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, with a banner displaying the words "Mission Accomplished." He spoke only hours after arriving on the aircraft carrier in a flight suit. That absurdly premature speech became the most infamous of his presidency, and it stands as one of the few things Bush has admitted to regretting.

Stylistically, the speeches by the law professor and the cowboy could not have been more different. Where Bush was militaristic, Obama was solemn. Where Bush was triumphalist, Obama was understated. And where Bush was clearly politically minded, no conceivable partisan trace could be found in Obama’s words.

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But all of this cannot come to pass until we bring an end to this war in Iraq. Most of you know I opposed this war from the start. I thought it was a tragic mistake. Today we grieve for the families who have lost loved ones, the hearts that have been broken, and the young lives that could have been. America, it's time to start bringing our troops home. It's time to admit that no amount of American lives can resolve the political disagreement that lies at the heart of someone else's civil war.

This afternoon, 33 months into his presidency and just over a year after declaring the end of combat operations in Iraq, Obama appeared in the White House briefing room and said:

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So when Johnson recently told an audience in Decatur that the U.S. needed to withdraw immediately from the Middle East, Johnson knew what he was doing. The war is no longer popular. The Republican congressman was speaking to a mostly white conservative crowd -- and he received huge applause for his words.

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