NOTE TO NEW YORK TIMES: WAR IS HELL

Sabrea Kudi cannot find her son. He was taken by American soldiers nearly nine months ago, and he has not been seen since.

"I'm afraid he's dead," Kudi said.

Lara Waad cannot find her husband. He was arrested in a raid, too.

In Abu Sifa, a village north of Baghdad, entire swaths of farmland have been cleared of males - fathers, sons, brothers, cousins.

Men are not available to do men's work. Women till the fields, guard the houses and hoist sacks of grapefruit on their backs.

Iraq has a new generation of missing men. Instead of ending up in mass graves or at the bottom of the Tigris River, as they often did during the rule of Saddam Hussein, they are detained somewhere in American jails.

Although the insurgency has cooled, with suicide attacks against civilians now eclipsing armed clashes with American troops, American forces are conducting daily raids, bursting into homes and sweeping up families. More than 10,000 men and boys are in custody.

I despise the damnation by insinuation in such liberal drivel as this. The article implies some parallelism between Saddam's mass graves and US POW camps.

The article says entire swaths have been "cleared of males". Are we to infer that the US Army has swept across the country side in some King Herod like round-up of all male-born children of any generation? Most certainly that is not the case.

Let's face it...war is hell. We've got US soldiers, who, whether you like it or not, happen to represent the arbiter of right and wrong in this country for the moment, on the ground and in harms way. There are less than 130,000 soldiers. There are 25 Million Iraqis. The odds are not in our favor.

And so - in Iraq - one can be smart or one can be stupid. You want to be smart...get into your fields, till your soil. Work for yourself...lots of Iraqis are.

You want to be stupid? OK - gather in the street in masses. Raise your fists before the Soldiers and the cameras. Chant "Death to America" whenever you can. Toss rocks at the nervous just-off-the-farm GIs that comprise America's front line. Sneak around at night. Challenge the guards at checkpoints.

Look...this isn't downtown Omaha, for crying out loud. Certainly, New York Times reporter, you can sit in your little hotel room and file such reports as if you are the ACLU in Baghdad. But let's be real. Reports of late indicate that you, New York Times reporter, have taken to carrying your own sidearm as protection. Which means at some level you have intellectually acknowledged that you are in a bleedin' war zone!.

Well, New York Times reporter...so is my wife. So is Sarah's husband. So is Beth's son! And they are there wearing Desert Camouflage Uniforms (in accordance with international law as established under the Geneva conventions) that effectively say "Hey, Jihadi Terrorist...point that IED at me!)

But you, pistol packing New York Times reporter, while you take extraordinary precautions in a war zone, you also park yourself way up upon your high horse and look down upon America's finest and don't give them the same break. The fact is our soldiers are doing what has to be done to reduce the odds against them (face it...at one soldier for every 200 or so Iraqis, Jihadists, terrorists, and foreign born miscreant the odds will never be "even). Perhaps that is why they say "War is Hell", New York Times reporter.

Of course, it can't be too much Hell....as there have been over 100 newspapers born since US forces have been in Baghdad.

Ironic, ain't it. The same GI's you damn with implication are daily allowing the creation of more folks who do what you do...

You disgust me.