[A]s time dragged on, almost all soldiers exposed to continuous or semi-continuous combat [in World War Two] broke down. As the authors of the American official report Combat Exhaustion explain:

There is no such thing as 'getting used to combat' ... Each moment of combat imposes a strain so great that men will break down in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their exposure ... psychiatric casualties are as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds in warfare ... Most men were ineffective after 180 or even 140 days. The general consensus was that a man reached his peak of effectiveness in the first 90 days of combat, that after that his efficiency began to fall off, and that he became steadily less valuable thereafter until he was completely useless ... The number of men on duty after 200 to 240 days of combat was small and their value to their units negligible.

The fighting of the Second World War, in short, led to an infantryman's breakdown in a little under a year.

Now, I would assume that the near-continuous combat of WW2 probably doesn't directly compare to what's happened in Iraq (a short and intense period of combat followed by month after month of counter-insurgency operations, policing and, occasionally, some direct combat), but surely the breaking point for this kind of duty must be somewhere in the same magnitude of time, in which case we should all be very worried that the soldiers in Iraq may well be approaching that point.

Let me be clear that I do not advocate, as many of my friends do, the wholesale pulling out of our military from Iraq -- I think that would not only be disastrous in many ways, but would also make a mockery of the sacrfice of all those who have already died there. On the other hand, it's clear that the Bush administration, having gone into Iraq without adequate preparation for the aftermath of the invasion, really have no plan whatsoever for an endgame there that will in any sense justify the price we've already paid.

It's really a situation where neither available choice is a particularly good one, which means that the only way to resolve it is to change the circumstance in such a way as to render one or the other preferable, or creates a new choice which has less of a downside than the others. That's one reason why I find the idea of Kerry mounting an international summit immediately so appealing, not just because with international backing we may be able to spread the pain around a little bit, but because (and this is something the Bush ideologues can never acknowledge) leaders of other countries may well come up with alternatives that we have not considered, or have rejected, and can alter the current equation in such a way to make those alternatives newly palatable.

But the clock is ticking, and we're still five months away from Kerry taking office if he wins the election. Is it possible, I wonder, considering the horrible dilemma we've thrust into by Bush, that Kerry might actually considering convening a summit even before taking office? Can he even do that without running afoul of national security laws?


Update:

You don't start a fight with someone you can't talk to.
-- C.J. Cherryh

Lest one leave with the impression that "empathy" is just another namby-pamby touchy-feely thing that hardnosed worldly-wise pragmatists like the Bushies don't really need to get along in the world, consider the fact that empathy (or something very much like it) is vital in military planning, because one cannot make proper plans without being able to anticipate (to some degree of correctness) what one's enemy is likely to do. No one, not even the United State, has the resources to cover every conceivable possible course of action, so planners must understand how the enemy thinks and set up to counter the actions which are likely to flow from that understanding.

Clearly, the war planners in the Bush administration completely lacked that ability and, worse, ignored or waved off people who warned them that they were making a big mistake. By relying on their ideological preconceptions and the information they got from people like Chalabi (who tailored the information to give them what they wanted to hear), and then setting out to cherry-pick intelligence until it confirmed their prejudgments, instead of seeing the situation as clearly as possible and understanding how the enemy would proceed, Bush and the neocons insured that we'd fall into the ever-sinking spiral we seem to be.