Broken soldiers.(The Last Word)

"See all that dark stuff?" asked Lt. Col. Robert Carroll, an Army field surgeon, displaying a digital photograph of the inside of a wounded soldier's head to a Washington Post reporter. "That's dead brain. That ain't gonna regenerate. And that's not uncommon. That's really not uncommon. We do craniotomies on average, lately, of one a day."

A craniotomy involves removing a large part of the skull in order to treat a severely traumatized brain. U.S. Army field doctors in Baghdad "are reeling from a stream of young soldiers with wounds so devastating that they probably would have been fatal in any previous war," reported the Post. Many of those wounds are inflicted by remote-controlled improvised explosive devices (IEDs) designed to nullify the effects of Kevlar body armor: IEDs hurl loads of shrapnel and dirt upward into the faces of our men, leaving them blind, brain damaged, or both.

Of those troops suffering brain trauma, nearly half will never recover consciousness. Yet they are kept alive and sent home in the belief that "loved ones will find value in holding the soldier's hand before confronting the decision to remove life support." Those who recover will be "functional," their athletic bodies performing mundane tasks with great difficulty. "I'm actually glad I'm here and not at home, tending to all the social issues with all these broken soldiers," comments Carroll.

War--even when justly fought--is a singular plague that claims the courageous and spares the craven. As James Madison said, it is among the most dreadful enemies of public liberty, "because it comprises and develops the germ of every other."

Marx, by way of contrast, embraced war as a means of building the total state. Writing in 1851, Marx told his disciples: "You will have to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars and international wars, not only in order to change existing conditions, but also in order to change yourselves and fit yourselves for the exercise of political power."

Appropriately, Marx's words resonate with those of his modern disciples, the Trotskyite "neoconservatives" who perceive the Iraq war as the first of several intended to "liberate" the Mid die East--and then to unite the world under a single global "rule set."

Insists neocon theorist Michael Ledeen, "we are the one truly revolutionary country in the world, as we have been for more than 200 years. Creative destruction is our middle name." A Trotskyite socialist who also expresses admiration for Mussolini (a largely disavowed disciple of Marx), Ledeen candidly extols "total war" against the Muslim world as a revolutionary strategy: "I mean the kind of ...