Some of you reading this may not follow baseball, but in the good old days, if a pitcher on Team A hit a batter for Team B, Team B's pitcher would retaliate with a fastball to the head of one of Team A's batters. This kind of mutually-assured-destruction both teams honest. But what works for baseball does not always work in real life.

The Iraq war has been a part of our lives since 2003. Thanks to the miracle of modern publishing, we can get the inside story on how the war has been fought while the war is still raging. Thanks to the miracle of modern blogging, we don't have to actually read those books to know what the insiders think. The latest relevation is that the cowboy in the Oval Office was foaming at the mouth in discussing war strategy with his generals, including commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, who recently published a book, Wiser in Battle: A Soldier's Story (hat tip to TomDispatch, from whom I'm quoting below).

Let me briefly set the scene, as Sanchez tells it on pages 349-350 of Wiser in Battle. It's April 6, 2004. L. Paul Bremer III, head of the occupation's Coalition Provisional Authority, as well as the President's colonial viceroy in Baghdad, and Gen. Sanchez were in Iraq in video teleconference with the President, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. (Assumedly, the event was recorded and so revisitable by a note-taking Sanchez.) The first full-scale American offensive against the resistant Sunni city of Fallujah was just being launched, while, in Iraq's Shiite south, the U.S. military was preparing for a campaign against cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia.

According to Sanchez, Powell was talking tough that day: "We've got to smash somebody's ass quickly," the general reports him saying. "There has to be a total victory somewhere. We must have a brute demonstration of power." (And indeed, by the end of April, parts of Fallujah would be in ruins, as, by August, would expanses of the oldest parts of the holy Shiite city of Najaf. Sadr himself would, however, escape to fight another day; and, in order to declare Powell's "total victory," the U.S. military would have to return to Fallujah that November, after the U.S. presidential election, and reduce three-quarters of it to virtual rubble.) Bush then turned to the subject of al-Sadr: "At the end of this campaign al-Sadr must be gone," he insisted to his top advisors. "At a minimum, he will be arrested. It is essential he be wiped out."

Not long after that, the President "launched" what an evidently bewildered Sanchez politely describes as "a kind of confused pep talk regarding both Fallujah and our upcoming southern campaign [against the Mahdi Army]." Here then is that "pep talk." While you read it, try to imagine anything like it coming out of the mouth of any other American president, or anything not like it coming out of the mouth of any evil enemy leader in the films of the President's -- and my -- childhood:

"'Kick ass!' [Bush] said, echoing Colin Powell's tough talk. 'If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can't send that message. It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal.

"There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!'"

This reminds me of Bush's comment in 2003 when someone told him that his war generated resistance from the insurgency:

President Bush said Wednesday that American troops under fire in Iraq aren't about to pull out, and he challenged those tempted to attack U.S. forces, "Bring them on."

The cowboy loves war, when someone else is fighting it. He put the soldiers there, and many come back to the United States in a coffin. After urging the insurgency to bring it on, they did bring it on, killing American soldiers.