Where is the context?

Guest columnist James Murr wrote in Friday's Times about a chance encounter overseas:

My wife and I were shopping in a silver store in San Miguel de Cozumel while on vacation last month. While my wife was haggling in Spanish with a merchant about a silver dolphin, his partner approached me, and we began speaking in English.

He was very friendly, but he immediately turned the conversation to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

"Why are you in Iraq?"

A harsh reality intruded upon this peaceful moment on the sunny island.

After pointing out the U.S.-sponsored wars in Central America during the 1980s, he focused on oil as the reason for invading Iraq. He briefly mentioned the CIA going after Venezuela because the president is not subservient to the U.S. He stated that everyone he knows is opposed to the occupation of Iraq.

The chance encounter reminded me that U.S. was approaching the end of three full years of the occupation of Iraq. The third-year anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq took place at 5:30 a.m. March 20, Baghdad time. Since the invasion, more than 2,300 of U.S. troops have been killed and over 18,000 wounded.

Murr continues on, making many of the anti-Bush "progressive" left's talking points on Iraq. He closes with:

This administration has been exposed in a series of lies that manufactured, fixed and invented reasons for the invasion and occupation. Every policy has been a disaster, an exercise in lawlessness, incompetence and corruption, including the ruthless employment of chemical weapons, torture, and kidnapping. This administration is amoral, and its totalitarian leaning should be of great concern to all citizens.

History teaches us that wars are always launched by rulers whipping up patriotism and nationalism to mask the underlying economic reasons.

Citizens never willingly embrace the death and destruction of war, but must be fooled into entering the killing fields, while their leaders watch from a safe and comfortable distance.

As the occupation grinds on without an end, the tragedy is compounded by more U.S. troops killed, more shattered families, more widows and orphans, more destruction, suffering and hate. The question that Cindy Sheehan wants to ask the president still remains valid: "What noble cause did my son die for?"

I would ask James, where is the context in his analysis? Where is the understanding that the US was paying a billion or two dollars a year with no end in sight to maintain the No-Fly zones in Iraq? Where is the acknowledgement that Sadaam--to what success remains not fully clear--was working at subverting the sanctions regime with help of America's (and the Left's most favorite) erstwhile allies via Oil for Food?

Despite what some might think, I have no problem with people disagreement over the wisdom of invading Iraq. Given the way these three years have gone and the multiple self-inflicted wounds we've endured, there are times to wonder about the wisdom of it all. What I don't suffer is talking points devoid of context. Nothing happens in a vacuum, and that includes Iraq.

Why no honest discussion of whether or not a shift in US foreign policy was warranted by the events of 9/11 and the nature of new threats to American security it embodied? How is it possible to make an argument against the Bush Doctrine without even a cursory mention of how and why it became policy?

Are flat declarations of lies, amoral criminality and totalitarian leanings enough? Not for my money.

Why no answers to these and other questions that can be analyzed and discussed?

Discussion of Iraq, even three plus years later is welcome--if not frustrating--and necessary. So is the context in which the decisions were made that became our current situation.