US Soldiers in Iraq
I was talking to my good friend Alex Mistri, a man who spent a year working for the military and the State Department in Iraq, and I asked him what he thought about departure of combat troops from that beleaguered country.
He told me he was deeply ambivalent. He wished that the president had a just a little more patience to give the Iraqis a chance to get their coalition government together. On the one hand, he was happy to see that our policies over there have worked and that many of our troops are coming home knowing that they did a good job. On the other hand, he is deeply apprehensive that the cake isn’t ready yet, and by leaving, we give extremists a chance to destabilize the country.
I share Alex’s deep ambivalence. I share Alex’s pride in the job our combat troops did in battling terrorists and stabilizing large sections of a country that has been in constant turmoil for almost a decade. But this thing is not over, and I hope that the president didn’t rush this for political reasons.
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