To Marc Malone:
Are you are out of your friggin’ mind?. Seriously.
If it wasn’t bad enough we gave up on bin Laden and Afghanistan before the job was done, and that we used 9/11 as an excuse to cherry pick intel and outright lie about the reasons to invade Iraq, (whose *only* support of terrorism began and ended with the Palestinians), we also made an absolute complete botch of maintaining order and infrastructure, starting with the looting that occurred at the very beginning of our watch. And under out watch, al-Qaeda and its allies came on in to party, and then the Sunnis and Shiite’s went for each other’s throats, and what do we have to show for it 5 years later: 4100+ American soldiers killed, 30,000+ wounded, upwards to over a million Iraqi casualties (before you protest this number — 2 of the most rigorous peer-reviewed studies have it in that range), widespread defacto bribery of Sunni insurgents to behave themselves and the US having to split its already overworked military to send more troops back to Afghanistan to deal a resurgent Taliban.
By any sane account, the whole enterprise was the mother of all clusterf*cks from beginning to end.
