Not long ago, I was in CVS Pharmacy with my parents; Mom was shopping for some last minute Christmas accommodations in preparation for the holiday family gatherings.

As she and my father scoured the store for everything needed, I went to the book and magazine aisle to look around.  The selection was pretty slim, as usual, filled with health & fitness and pop culture magazines, not much for a somewhat dedicated reader of Time, Newsweek and the like.

But there was one that did catch my eye and prompt me to pick it up and skim its pages.

It was an issue of Life, a dedication in photos to the years 2000 through 2009, subtitled “The Decade That Changed The World.”

Among the events depicted were the attacks on 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the elections of George W. Bush and Barack Obama and the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The collection from the most latter of the aforementioned are those that struck within me the very dissonant chord progression that now guides the inspiration for the words flowing forth from my mind, through my fingers and onto the page.

The most compelling of them all though was not the iconic image of Saddam Hussein’s monument to himself being torn from its pedestal or of President Bush’s premature declaration of victory aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.

The photo, of which I may never forget, featured an American soldier sitting cross-legged on the ground holding an Iraqi child – an infant girl -  in his lap.  The child’s clothes were stained with blood, though she appeared to be alright, and the soldier simply gazed down on her with a mixed look of seeming confusion, melancholy and sorrow.

On an impulse, I decided not to purchase the magazine and placed it back on the shelf.  Upon returning home, I regretted the decision, unable to find an online edition.  But I managed to find something else just as moving.

Searching the magazine’s Web site, I came across a photo taken at Arlington National Cemetery of a woman, lying face-down in grief in front of her fiancé’s grave, an Army Ranger killed in Iraq in 2007(Life).

These images will in all likelihood never lose their relevance, as they illustrate the true cost of war.  Dollars and cents are real, but they can be skewered, fudged, massaged and ultimately, their impact hidden.  Violence, blood, death and displacement are not as easily manipulated.

Other reasons these images stuck out to me were not only their relevance to the theme of war in general, but also to the current climate and situations surrounding the escalation in Afghanistan and lead-footed withdrawal from Iraq.

As everyone may know, President Obama has ordered 30,000 additional American forces be deployed to Afghanistan to help train the Afghan government forces to fend off insurgencies and to try to eradicate al-Qaida’s influence in the region.

Once upon a time, the neo-conservative in me would have been in broad favor of such a measure, but no longer.  I now believe that it is time to bring home every troop from Afghanistan as well as Iraq.

While I am not a pacifist by any stretch of the imagination, I do not think that either of these wars are worth fighting anymore.

The Iraqi conflict should have never been fought in the first place, but that is neither here nor there.  The American public may never truly know what happened in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion.  The only sure thing is that it was a giant mistake.

The invasion of Afghanistan was originally one of justifiable nature.  But it has been so badly mismanaged, I fear it is a lost cause.  The mission is too broad and its objectives frankly not feasible anymore, if they ever were.

To assume that the Taliban and Islamic fundamentalism can forever be purged from the Afghan culture and that an indefinite American presence is needed to do so is very simply wishful and flawed thinking.  The same goes for thinking that the Karzai government is a competent partner in all of this as well.

And as far as dealing with al-Qaida, all evidence points to the fact that their Afghanistan presence is currently minimal at best.

These wars have cost us too much, and it’s time they end.  We went into them (at least one anyway) to punish those who mercilessly slaughtered almost 3,000 innocent Americans.

But Thomas Jefferson once said that war is “as much punishment to the punisher as to the sufferer.”  The woman mourning the loss of her future husband in the picture I mentioned above would probably agree.