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Yes, I'm aware of that. I was actually a hardcore liberal back then, who saw a lot of my classmates suffer from long deployments in what seemed a never ending, pointless war.
But as the saying goes... when the facts change, I change my mind. I think the War on Terror bought us a lot of skill in fighting this source of war, and I also think new technology has opened up new options we didn't have before. Just as "not every war is WW2," we shouldn't assume every war is Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan. Sometimes watt really does change
And in Iraq we said "see, every war doesn't have to be Vietnam! We can just turf out the dictator in a couple weeks and we're done!"
If the US had taken out Saddam, picked another senior Baathist and told them to be a little nicer to the Shiites, and kept the Baathist army mostly in place, that could indeed have happened.
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