From the Seattle Times

AL-ASAD, Iraq — In the desert chill, on the lonely nighttime roads of Iraq, Joe Johnson looks out over his machine gun and thinks of Justin.

It was on Easter morning 2004 that a chaplain and a colonel appeared on Joe and Jan Johnson's Georgia doorstep with the news. Justin, the boy Joe had fished and hunted with, the soldier son who'd gone off to Iraq a month earlier, was dead at 22, killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad.

Today it's Joe who mans the M-240 machine gun atop a Humvee, warily watching the sides of the road — an unlikely Army corporal at 48, a father who came here for revenge, a Christian missionary on a crusade against Islam, and a man who, after six months at war, is ready to go home.

"I shouldn't even have come," he now says. And if he leaves Iraq with no blood on his hands, he says, that's fine, too

read more at the Seattle Times

From the BBC

........"""""The UK Prime Minister Tony Blair paid a visit to Basra in May that year [2003] and spoke rather glowingly of Iraqi prospects. This is what he told British troops:

"I would like to think that in maybe a year or two years time, it's going to be possible for some of you to come back here and see the changes in this country that have arisen from what you've done today."

Some of the soldiers have indeed probably been back, where they now face even greater dangers from sophisticated roadside bombs. But underneath, it was rather different, as newly leaked memos from the senior British official in Iraq at the time have revealed.

They have been printed in a new book about Iraq called Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq by a New York Times correspondent, Michael Gordon, and a retired US Marine officer, General Bernard Trainor.

The official was John Sawers, a Foreign Office high-flyer who is currently the political director. He met Mr Blair on that trip in May and one memo headed "Iraq: what's going wrong?" dates from the same month.

He wrote about the US administration in Baghdad led by retired US General Jay Garner: "No leadership, no strategy, no coordination, no structure and inaccessible to ordinary Iraqis... Garner and his team of 60-year-old retired generals are well-meaning but out of their depth."

He criticised just about everything, calling it an "unbelievable mess".

His current views on Iraq are not publicly known. Mr Sawers is a discreet diplomat and is anyway now grappling with another problem which is proving intractable - Iran's nuclear programme.

His memos show how early problems developed which are still evident today.

Paul.Reynolds-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk