On the second day of the failed court-martial of Lieutenant Ehren Watada, military prosecutors summoned Lieutenant Colonel William James to the witness stand.

In he walked, recently off a plane from Iraq, looking every bit the part of the battle-hardened officer of considerable rank. His voice boomed as he took the oath to testify, and his deep-set eyes stared coldly across the Fort Lewis courtroom, an unromantic gaze that conveyed his long relationship with the brute force that underpins niceties such as the rule of law. Those eyes, the way his brow wrinkled in concentration, the way his mouth seemed fixed in a permanent disgusted pout, and his damp, bald head all combined to make him look disturbingly like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, playing Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, the icy-eyed "exterminate them all" realist from another war gone bad, Vietnam.

Brando's Kurtz had unignorable charisma—a dark charisma that drew in jungle natives and disaffected American soldiers alike—and Lieutenant Colonel James likewise had something unignorable about him. His charisma was an alluring pragmatism, a "we're gonna go get the job done and kick some ass doing it" attitude so strong that I knew exactly what a young Fort Lewis soldier meant when, standing outside the courtroom after James's testimony, he told a fellow grunt: "I would follow that guy into battle."

Watada, 28, did not follow James into battle, despite having been "counseled" by James concerning his misgivings about the Iraq war. ("Counseled" was the term the lieutenant colonel used, but one suspects a counseling session with Lieutenant Colonel James is not a nice rest on the couch.) Instead, Watada, slim, soft-spoken, cerebral, and in every way the antithesis of his counselor, chose to very publicly declare last summer that he would not be deploying to Iraq. He said he had come to see the war as an illegal enterprise foisted upon the American people through falsehoods and perhaps even outright trickery, and as a result, that he had an obligation to refuse the "illegal" order to deploy.

At Watada's court-martial, before the whole affair abruptly careened into a mistrial that left the future of the case against the celebrated war resister unclear, James described how he had tried last spring to talk Watada out of refusing the deployment order. "The first thing that I tried to impress upon him was not to make a young man's mistake," James recounted. "Not to make decisions based on emotion."

It was exactly the kind of persuasion one would expect from the gruff, older, world-weary lieutenant colonel, but it was a somewhat ironic line of argument for him to have employed. At the time of their counseling session, in the spring of 2006, the war in Iraq had itself already been proven to be, to use James's formulation, a "young man's mistake"—a terrible series of triumphs of emotional urgency over long-view levelheadedness. The prime emotional mover in that mistake was fear, or, really, terror.

The memory of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the chilling specter of the Iraqi government clandestinely churning out weapons of mass destruction and passing them on to its al Qaeda friends, and the nightmare image of a "mushroom cloud" delivered to an American city, courtesy of a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein, were used by the Bush administration to confuse and cajole a jittery American public into supporting the invasion of a country that had not been a part of the September 11 attacks, did not have WMDs, did not have nuclear weapons, and did not have ties to al Qaeda.

Whether Bush intentionally misled the American public, or, in launching his war against Iraq, fell victim to a combination of post–September 11 paranoia and post-Afghanistan feelings of military omnipotence, doesn't really matter. Either way, the emotional foundation for his actions would be the same: hubris, a perennial mistake of the young.

Watada's "young man's mistake" in refusing to go to war, if it was indeed a mistake, and if it was indeed based on the excessive emotionalism of youth, was therefore quite similar in form to a "young man's mistake" made much earlier, and far above him in the military chain of command.

One of the more compelling aspects of Watada's journey from willing enlistee to a war resister facing up to six years in prison is how his personal transformation roughly mirrors the country's shifting perspective on the Iraq war. Watada enlisted in March of 2003, the same month that the bombing of Iraq started. He would have been 25 at the time, and he would have known that anyone joining the military then stood a good chance of being shipped off to Iraq in the event that "shock and awe" didn't produce a quick victory blanketed in rose petals.

Indeed, over the next two years, even as the situation in Iraq spiraled into a barely contained civil war, and even as the original rationales for the war all came undone, Watada remained willing to serve in Iraq. "Up until the fall of 2005, Lieutenant Watada will tell you, he was perfectly willing to go to Iraq," said Watada's civilian defense attorney, Eric Seitz, in his opening statement at the court-martial on Tuesday, February 6.

In this sense, Watada's evolution was in step with that of the average American—stubbornly slow to arrive at the conclusion that Iraq was a mistake warranting a radically new course. What changed? As Seitz put it, Watada started to pay attention, particularly as it became clear that he was going to be asked to deploy to Iraq the following year.

"When he began to read and learn more about the war in Iraq, Lieutenant Watada became increasingly disturbed and concerned," Seitz recounted in court. "He became very upset and disillusioned. He realized that there were going to be significant problems trying to reconcile what he learned with what he was going to be asked to do. He had a crisis of conscience, and as that crisis of conscience became deeper and deeper, he knew that if he was called upon to participate in this deployment he would have serious conflicts."

In the fall of 2006, the country as a whole would register a similar change in perspective (though it would politely be labeled a "crisis of confidence" rather than a "crisis of conscience") with both houses of Congress being handed to the Democrats for the first time in 12 years, largely because of voter concern about the direction of the war in Iraq. But Watada's situation was different from that of the average voter, who could simply change his or her mind, register dissatisfaction with the war in the form of a vote for a Democratic candidate, and then go on with his or her life. Watada was in the military, and this, as much as anything else, was his "mistake": coming to his crisis of conscience, and then going so far with it, all while on active duty.

It made for a great media narrative on a number of levels, not least because it offered the mainstream press, which had been chastised for failing to challenge the administration's faulty assertions in the run-up to the war, a chance to report on a court-martial that would, if all went Watada's way, put the legitimacy of the Iraq war on trial. This held out the tantalizing prospect that the U.S. military would now be forced to do, in a legal setting, what the administration has rarely been forced to do: defend, in detail and under penalty of perjury, the rightness of the justification for war with Iraq.

Naturally, the military moved to prevent any such thing from happening. In an echo of the way the Bush administration tried, when it could, to prevent political opponents from questioning the justification for the war, the military judge overseeing the Watada court-martial ruled that Watada could not defend himself against the charges—missing his deployment and making antiwar statements "unbecoming an officer"—by arguing that the illegality of the war justified his actions.

This dismissal of Watada's defense, before the court-martial had even begun, led to a series of legal contortions that ultimately caused the proceedings to collapse, rather spectacularly, early in the afternoon of Wednesday, February 7—a collapse that, again, echoed the recent experiences of the Bush administration. Watada had signed a "stipulation" admitting that he did not deploy to Iraq, a fact that was central to the case, but also a fact obvious to everyone by virtue of Watada's sitting there in the courtroom. Although the judge, Lieutenant Colonel John Head, had initially accepted this stipulation, on Wednesday, the third day of the court-martial, Judge Head decided the stipulation should be thrown out because he had come to believe it amounted to a confession, in the sense that it admitted to all the facts necessary, in his eyes, to convict Watada on the charge of not deploying.

Only in a courtroom where Watada's defense had already been ruled "irrelevant" could this stipulation of basic facts be seen as a confession. And with Watada maintaining that the stipulation was not a confession, but rather just a statement outlining actions he took—actions that he could defend, given the chance—a mistrial became inevitable.

Just like this administration couldn't manage the Iraq war, they also couldn't manage to keep a high-profile military trial from going off the rails. And as with the collapse of the Iraq campaign, the collapse of the court-martial of Lieutenant Ehren Watada proved so baffling, given the stakes, that it soon gave way to an alternative theory: that this failure was not a product of incompetence, but instead by design, an effort by the military to force a mistrial and thereby make the case go away, to let Watada's fight fade into an obscure and lengthy process of appeals concerning double jeopardy—a process that some legal experts, and Watada's defense attorney, now think will ultimately end in Watada escaping prosecution altogether.

What does it mean that this is where the Watada court-martial has brought us? It means that Lieutenant Colonel William James is free to head back to Iraq, where he will command troops in one more effort to get it right. It means that Lieutenant Watada goes back to his desk job at Fort Lewis, awaiting a new court-martial date in March, a date that is almost certain to be pushed back because of appeals. And it means that once again people don't know whether to think of the government and military as frighteningly incompetent or deviously corrupt.