P. J. O'Rourke reminisces about Mike Kelly and his time as an imbedded reported before he died:

Oh, yeah. These guys just loved Mike, and they really wanted to talk about it. I mean, everybody from General Blount right down to the sergeant who had been driving Mike around—not the one who was driving when he died, but who had been driving him around when he was with his proper embed, before he sort of wiggled out in order to get up to the front. Every single one of them said, "I've just never met anyone who was interested in the same stuff that I am." For one of them, it would be military history, for another one it would be politics, for one of them it would be logistics and planning. Finally, I get down to this sergeant and he said: "Me and Mike, we used to talk for hours." And I asked, "What'd you talk about?" And—if you'll excuse the language— he said, "Beer and pussy." In fact, Mike had bumped into somebody else I talked to, a photographer for USA Today, Jack Gruber, and he said, "Yeah, I bumped into Mike and he said, 'It's been a long time since I've been around eighteen-year olds—if I have to talk about beer and pussy for one more minute, my head is going to explode.'" But they just all loved him. Mike's enthusiasm, and his way of paying attention to people, and the fact that for at least those moments he was with those people, he did care about that stuff in the way they did—that's part of what made him such a good reporter.

And his take on what the future holds:

I think Rumsfeld put his finger right on it: "Long slog." My feeling is twofold: I don't think we are going to straighten out this country any time soon; it's going to be a very long haul. On the other hand, vast areas of Iraq are very peaceful and have been rid of a disgusting and repressive government. The other thing is, everyone talks about Iraq not being stable, but when it was stable it attacked Israel in 1967 and in 1973, it attacked Iran, it attacked Kuwait, it fostered terrorism in the Middle East. Who wants a stable Iraq? It's better for us and, in a way, better for the world that this government has been weakened and destroyed. Does it leave a mess behind? Do we owe it to the people of Iraq to try our best to clean up that mess? Yes. But is that mess our fault? No. It's a very complicated situation.

And finally, if he was locked in a room with Chris Buckley and Dave Barry attempting to solve Mid-East crises:

First of all, it better be a lot of cigars and a lot of beer! An awful lot of beer, because we're going to be in there for a long, long time. The problems of the Middle East are the problems of mankind since we came out of the trees. They just happen to be a little more intense. When you look at a chaotic region like the Middle East, what you're really seeing is most of human history, and some parts of America and some parts of Europe and a few parts of Asia are glaring exceptions. The kind of peaceful, productive, incredibly wealthy life that we live in these few areas around the world—this has only been going on for a nanosecond as time goes. It's so exceptional I'm not even sure what it means. The whole world might degenerate back into the Middle East, because that's what it's always been. And you can't solve the problem of the Middle East, because it's not a problem, it's a condition. It's the normal condition of mankind.

If you read Donald Kagan's The Peloponnesian War, it's all there. It's been going on like this, time out of mind. Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I'm not even sure we can draw lessons from them.

Read the whole thing.