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The Hard Lessons of Iraq
Making Sense
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Nearly 5,000 of our fine men and women died in Iraq.Who’s going to explain Iraq to their loved ones now?Who’s going to explain why, if it was so important that we had to go to Iraq in 2003, we just walked away?Iraq is back in our living rooms every night. Only this time, it’s not a prime-time miniseries about how American military superiority topples the bad guy and democratizes a brutal dictatorship.This time it’s about a war with another bad ending for the United States - another Vietnam.We’re watching the Iraqi government we created and propped up with billions being humiliated by a bunch of Muslim extremists in pickup trucks.A third of Iraq is in the hands of ISIS. The Iraqi army, like the South Vietnamese army we trained before we bailed out of Vietnam, dropped their weapons, stripped off their uniforms and pretended to be plumbers.How can the families of our dead and wounded soldiers stand watching Iraq split into three parts and descend into a bloody sectarian Hell again?I feel so sorry for the military families. What do you say now to a Gold Star Mother who lost her child fighting in Iraq?Can you explain to her what her son died for?