Scarecrow: "...some people without brains do an awful lot of talking... don't they?"

There is still room for great strides toward success, but there will never be easy answers to securing freedom and security for Iraqis. The price to be paid for years to come will be money, mayhem and human lives. In many ways we are still working to fix the problems left by one of the leading mindsets of the early days after the U.S. invasion...optimism.

My favorite example, which can play as a metaphor for bigger and more important parts of the U.S. operation here, is so simple it's almost endearing.

Sandbags

When work began to build housing areas for the American military and government employees who would bring democracy to Iraq, sandbags were a key building block. Every hooch is surrounded by sandbags for protection from incoming rounds. But with optimism built into the blueprints, someone came up with what I'm sure they thought was a superior concept. Biodegradable sandbags. Think about it...pretend it's 2003. It won't be long before we'll take the training wheels off Iraq's new government, hand over the keys and tell the Iraqis to drive carefully. The sandbags will be dissolving. All we'll have to do is push around some mounds of sand, sweep up and go home.

Four years later, the thousands of piles of hundreds of thousands of biodegradable sandbags are literally collapsing around us. The sandbags are disintegrating, pushed at an even more rapid pace by the extremely harsh weather conditions here.

It's not uncommon to have to step around or over the remains of a sandbag avalanche as you head in or out of your hooch. Iraqi work crews are slowly replacing the mini-mountains of crumbling sandbags with real ones. It's an enormous project that I am sure will cost more money than most of us will see in our lifetime.

But what choice do we have? We're going to need sandbags in the IZ a lot longer than we expected.

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Still to come...How 45 seconds in the IZ can mean the difference between life and death

Tinman

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