An Anniversary of Shame - POLITICO Magazine: "We went into Iraq to rid a dictator of WMD he didn’t have, and to impose democracy on a country that plainly wasn’t ready for it. Instead, American troops spent more than a decade in Iraq —at the cost of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives and limbs -- as a recruiting tool. The societal sickness we created in Iraq—whereby nearly a generation of angry young Arab Islamists have grown up in seething resentment of the American military in their backyards—has fed upon itself since that time. The Bush administration inadvertantly promoted this when it turned the Iraqi insurgency into a terrorist threat like al Qaeda (rather than seeing it for what it was, a backlash against the U.S. occupation), and alienated much of the Iraqi population with often-brutal tactics.
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