Cross posted to A Magnificent Wreckage

You’ve likely noticed that the frequency of my Iraq posts (hence most of my posting) has dropped off in recent weeks.  It’s not for lack of interest in blogging, or even for lack of time.  It’s simply for a lack of ability to add anything new to the situation.  Things are going to shit over there, and I don’t if saying that every few days is really communicating anything that we don’t already know.
However, this is not to say that there haven’t been developments of note.  Particularly interesting to me is this piece from the Newsday, in which it is finally acknowledged that what we are seeing is the birthing of a civil war.  Perhaps it’s already born.

I am also put in the awkward position of having “experts” acknowledge what I claimed all along: that our recent “falloff in casualties” was the result of an insurgent strategy to keep us pinned in our bases while they used the opportunity to wreak havok unmolested.  Awkward because, all things being equal, I’d rather not be right about this.

Ah well.

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; -on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.


Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”