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Proposed "new" conventional wisdom: "In all this, we should be clear on one thing: Even if the optimistic scenarios prevail, this war was a mistake from beginning to end."
Before I went off to Iraq last year as part of the surge I was told that it had failed. While there I learned that few Americans cared what General Petraeus had to report from Iraq. And now that I'm back I discover that it wasn't worth it. It's hard to keep up with all the changes of our fast-paced society today.
I wrote this post in late June 2007 from Baghdad, during the earliest days and heaviest fighting of the surge.
Beyond the headline-making casualty figures, I was with people who'd just missed their kids high school (and college) graduation. Others who'd missed births. Others whose marriages ended, and no one who didn't sacrifice something. If you wonder how people can do such things - I can't answer. But I can ask you to understand that we couldn't if we didn't know we could win.
I'm in America this Fathers Day, but last year I was in Iraq. I actually posted this a couple weeks after that day, I'm not sure anyone got my message (which I thought I made clear in my opening paragraphs) but I think it says more now then it did then.
Most people never knew (unless they inferred it from the death tolls) and some might have since forgotten that at the time I wrote this the early battles of the surge were raging and Americans were dying at the highest level of the war and back home failure had already been declared.
We soldiered on.