A Corpse in a Cesspool

David Finkel has written a stunning article about Iraq for The Washington Post, telling the story of Army Maj. Brent Cummings' and a rotting corpse in a Kamaliya sewage pit. It is a story that reveals, as Jessica Lynch would say, the true heroism of our soldiers when the hype is stripped away.
Finkel's description is a window onto a moment that damages a soul, a snapshot of the exact moment when President Bush's brutish policy grabs hold of an American soldier and ruins his life.
Even stronger than that, Finkel's piece is the most respectful, honest and utterly devastating description I have read of the madness our soldiers face everyday in Iraq.
Reminiscent of Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Finkel tells the story of one Army officer trying to remove a corpse floating in a cesspool beneath an abandoned Iraqi factory--a task that needed to be completed so that the Army could turn the site into a U.S. military outpost. Along the way, Cummings tries to find a balance between military objectives, local culture, human feelings and omnipresent deadly violence -- between Muslim customs, the well-being of resident families, the mental health of U.S. soldiers, and the reality of a world where every object and every inch of land must be treated as an unexploded bomb. And after all this balancing, all these difficult decisions, all the problem solving, all the good that a group of young soldiers can try to do for the world -- it all turns out to have been in vain, useless, for naught.
Although Finkel never criticizes directly, the rotting stench of Bush's kingly intransigence seeps from every page of Army Maj. Brent Cummings' story.
While the article relays the absolute humanity of our soldiers, it also turns a corpse in a cesspool into a metaphor for the entire Bush policy in Iraq.

Finkel opens with a description of the task at hand: cont