BBQ, Baseball, and Botched Post-War Planning

Last night Fort Benning's Staff Judge Advocate (SJA -- the head JAG) invited me to the annual Chattahoochee (and another Georgia county) Bar Association barbecue, held at and during a minor league baseball game in Columbus, Ga. I was fortunate to have been (electronically) introduced to the SJA by a a partner at my law firm who had previously been the JAG (or TJAG, the head lawyer) of the Army.

Anyhow, I met many of Fort Benning's JAGs and other local lawyers, and spent a wonderful summer evening conversing about today's military, what went right and wrong in Iraq, and how to fix the rule of law there. Most frustrating, of course, is that, as in other aspects of post-war planning, the Pentagon (and the administration generally) simply dropped the ball as to building up and institutionalizing the rule of law. We've righted that ship, but the question remains whether the window of opportunity closed before we did so. I of course would not be going to Baghdad if I thought the situation was hopeless. More on that when I'm in country, but for now I'm savoring my last night in America, complete with homemade peach cobbler and wisecracking bullpen pitchers.