To the Editor:

I found your article both reassuring and alarming. Reassuring in that military officers are at least asking what went wrong in Iraq and why. Alarming, in that they couldn’t answer the question “Should the war have been fought?”

Let’s see: the evidence for weapons of mass destruction was known to be dubious even at the time; there was no evidence at all that Iraq played any role in 9/11; there were targets of far more relevance in Afghanistan; there was no planning whatsoever for reconstruction; and finally, there was abundant historical data that military action isn’t effective against decentralized insurgencies.

How can they know all that and still answer the question by saying “I honestly don’t know how I feel about that”? What is wrong with these people?

Michael Chorost
San Francisco, Oct. 15, 2007

Note from KBJ: What’s wrong with them is that they lack the letter writer’s preternatural ability to discern simplicity in complexity. In other words, they’re not simpletons.