As some in the Republican party turn against the strategy in Iraq, military families and ex-servicemen are also losing faith, writes Denis Stauntonin Arlington, Virginia
While President George Bush was calling for patience with his Iraq strategy this week, staff at Arlington National Cemetery were hard at work, digging fresh graves and planting tombstones in Section 60, where many of the Iraq war dead are buried.
The rules at Arlington are strict - cut flowers are allowed but "any type of commemorative items are not permitted on graves except for flags placed on the graves by the government".
Nobody bothers with the rules in Section 60, however, and the authorities turn a blind eye to the photographs, notes and knick-knacks that clutter the newest graves, the disorder of fresh, undigested grief.
Next to the grave of Staff Sgt Alan Shaw, who died in Iraq in February, someone has placed a baseball from the Nationals, Washington's local team, alongside some newspaper cuttings and photographs.
Cpl Matthew Beler's tombstone is marked by two scarlet lipstick kisses and Robert Mogensen's son Josh has left a note by his father's grave.
"Dad I miss you so much and I wish you were here. I love you and I wish you were here to go fishing with me and to watch baseball," it says.
More than 3,600 US soldiers have died in Iraq - over half of them under the age of 24 - and more than 25,000 have been wounded. It has cost more than $560 billion (€406 billion) so far and the monthly cost of $10 billion (€7.26 billion) is more than the annual budget of many federal agencies, including the FBI, the Environmental Protection Agency and the entire federal judiciary system.
The House of Representatives voted this week to order the withdrawal of most US forces by April 1st, 2008, the third such resolution it has passed this year. The Senate will debate a similar resolution next week and at least eight Republicans have said they will join the Democrats in calling for a troop withdrawal.
A White House report found that the Iraqi government is making satisfactory progress towards meeting fewer than half the political and military goals set out by Congress when it authorised an increase in US troops earlier this year. Republican defections are said to have sent the White House into a panic this week, but Bush remains determined to resist the pressure to withdraw. "When we start drawing down our forces in Iraq it will be because our military commanders say the conditions on the ground are right, not because pollsters say it will be good politics," he said this week.
PUBLIC OPINION COULD not be clearer - seven out of 10 Americans want the troops to come home by next spring and nearly two out of three now believe the war was a mistake to begin with.
"Our son served twice in Iraq with a nation that is divided about the mission. It's horrible. My heart is breaking," says Fran Middleberg, who is part of a growing movement of military families who oppose the war. She asked that her son not be identified because he is still in the army.
"Whenever our military is sent on a mission, we really should all agree with it," she says. "There should never be doubt about what they are doing. I never want our troops to go on another mission that causes this much dissension within our country." As a member of Military Families Speak Out, Middleberg has opposed the Iraq war from the start, but unlike some high-profile anti-war protesters, she avoids conflict with other military families.
"We've been publicly doing some vigils or some actions and some people will walk by and possibly give us a dirty look. Or they'll come by to debate the issue," she says.
"I have to tell you that, in the United States, we're only 1 per cent of the population, all of us - military families. I will never get into an argument with somebody else in the military because, you know, we're the only ones who are sacrificing here."
Polling by the Military Times shows that soldiers in Iraq are increasingly pessimistic about their mission, with the number saying success is likely falling from 83 per cent in 2004 to 50 per cent last year. A Zogby poll found last year that 72 per cent of American troops serving in Iraq thought the US should leave the country within the next year, and more than one in four said the troops should leave immediately.
Steve Green, who served in Iraq as a combat engineer from 2004 to 2005, says it should be no surprise that soldiers have become increasingly disenchanted with the war. "Talk to guys who are on their third or fourth combat rotation and they see the same junk tour after tour after tour," he says. "Eventually they start asking themselves, 'exactly what are we to accomplish here this month, this year?' The military is human. It does ask itself, 'why exactly are we doing this?'"
A wiry 32-year-old who now works as a computer programmer and freelance photographer, Green says he joined the military when he left college because he wanted to do something "foolish and reckless". After six years in a headquarters company, he was shipped out to Iraq in 2004 as part of a unit providing protection to a bomb-disposal team in the northern town of Mosul.
Green, who believes the US attack on Afghanistan was "clearly required, not just justified but demanded", initially supported the Iraq war too, giving Bush the benefit of the doubt over the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
But as he and his comrades sat in their barracks in Iraq day after day, waiting for news of the latest suspect device, they started to discuss the reason they were there. "We often asked ourselves, 'if we weren't in this country, would my job exist? If it wasn't for this huge US military base, would I have to go out every day and have to deal with people wanting to put bombs in the ground?'" he says.
THE WEEKLY MAGAZINE The Nation this week published interviews with dozens of US servicemen who told of brutal treatment of Iraqis, especially during infantry raids on the homes of suspected insurgents.
Green recalls being given permission to "hose off" with his machine gun any car approaching a checkpoint that he perceived to be a threat, although his sergeant reminded him that, as "a human being, you're going to have to live with whatever you do for the rest of your life".
After years of army training focused on weapon safety, Green found when he went to Iraq that he had to turn those lessons on their head.
"When we were out doing security details, it was rather a shock but we learned that the most effective way to do crowd control and traffic cop was to point your gun at people. They told us that if you don't like an Iraqi, point your gun at them and they will go away. They do not understand anything until you point your weapon at them. For us in the unit, it was quite a shock," he says.
When he returned to the US and left the military, Green joined Iraq Veterans Against the War, forming an unlikely alliance with what he describes as "granola-eating types" to call for a US withdrawal.
"When you approach another American serviceman and say you are not in favour of the war, initially there might be a little bit of consternation. But when you talk to them about why you've come to feel that way, I've yet to meet a person who says 'that's absolutely wrong'." He is pessimistic about the prospect of any withdrawal from Iraq while Bush remains in power, but despite his opposition to the war he is slow to say that any of his fellow soldiers have died in vain. In the end, he says, their sacrifice is less about the merits of the mission than about America's capacity to deploy force wherever and whenever it chooses.
"When we signed up, we were basically agreeing to become the pointy end of the spear, the will made manifest of the American people," he says. "When you join the military you do sign up, at a certain level, for being disposable."