Back Home, More Frustration

The senator, nodding, told him, "I've seen what they put people through."

They seemed to be talking from two distant places. The poet musing on his veterans and their pain. The senator using Washington words to say she understands. She has been to Iraq twice and said she will go again in September, that she has spoken to the president. "On an individual basis, if you know of anything our office can do to help," she said, motioning to an aide.

Lawless shook his head. "They don't trust the government to help them."

In a coffeehouse across the street, Snowe found Jennifer James, 28, who had just returned from duty in the Green Zone. As a member of the 356th Broadcast Operations Detachment, James had heard Army briefings and the satellite feeds of members of Congress who broadcast messages home during tours there.

"What do you think?" Snowe asked her.

James bit her lip: "I'm proud of my service. I'm glad it's done." During her year in the Green Zone, "we started getting mortared heavily, very, very heavily," James said, describing the attacks' escalating from two or three in a week to 19 in a single day. People she knew were killed.

"Do you see any progress?" Snowe asked.

"The Iraqis say it's taken so long for everything to get so bad, in 40 years, it will be good," James said. "Forty years is a long time."

Later, in a car ride to the nearby town of Saco, Snowe mused on what she had been hearing. Initially, she backed the war, "because we were there. It did appear at the time that we were making military progress," and there was a need to rebuild and put a democratic government in place.

But, she said, "who could imagine that the war would last 4 1/2 years?"

"Now the question is," Snowe said, "what can we do?"

On Sept. 1, the Government Accountability Office will issue a report on whether the political benchmarks set for the Iraqi government have been met. That will fuel the arguments that she expects to have with the Petraeus report, due two weeks later. And the week after that, Snowe said, must come action.

She arrived in Saco, where last week Army recruiters said they had already met their goal for the year, signing up 83 men and women from throughout this region of shuttered textile mills.

During her visit, Snowe dropped in on the town's mayor, Mark Johnston, in the wine shop he owns downtown. "I don't want to spill any more American or English blood or any other of our allies' blood in a country that is not ready for democracy," he told Snowe.

She replied with her own frustration, the failure of the nascent Iraqi government. "I don't see any determination" on their part, she said.

Like Congress, the Iraqi parliament is taking August off. Johnston quoted his son, a Marine returned last year from a seven-month tour in Iraq, on the subject: "I'm sweating in 135-degree heat . . . [facing] death so the atrocities won't occur, and they can take a vacation?"

Last year, the mayor had confronted Snowe about "the lack of equipment, the lack of a whole policy. I wanted her to distance herself from the president."

Now, he told her, "I compliment you for taking a stand. As an elected official, I know sometimes it's hard to say: 'I made a mistake.' "