UK withdrawal and our veterans failed

None of the news stories I've seen yet have said anything but that the British withdrawal from Iraq is leaving the Basra area more secure.

There's another side to the story, though, according to this report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies: The British Defeat in the South and the Uncertain Bush "Strategy" in Iraq. Patrick Cockburn reports on this study in The Independent: Revealed: The true extent of Britain's failure in Basra.

Hmm. Just as the prince has gotten his orders....

Disturbing new report by the New York Times' Lizette Alvarez: Long Iraq Tours Can Make Home a Trying Front. According to this, decades-long military marriages are ending in divorce after too many deployments to Iraq.

Some therapists say they are bracing for this year’s divorces. Mary Coe, a marriage and family therapist working near Fort Campbell, an Army base on the border of Kentucky and Tennessee, said she was seeing “many, many divorces” right now. The 101st Airborne Division recently returned from its second deployment with an astonishing level of rage, she said. “Now we are seeing 15- to 20-year marriages not making it, and these are families that survived 20 years of deployments,” Dr. Coe said.

This follows, of course, the Washington Post report from this weekend on housing for wounded soldiers near Walter Reed Hospital: Today's story says the problem has been solved ... with a coat of paint (link to original story is in the sidebar to this one).

Much more important, of course, is getting new tax breaks enacted for America's richest families (Matt Taibbi story from Rolling Stone; more from The Carpetbagger).

Can't say we don't put family values first.....