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The writer compares the Iraq counter-insurgency to El Salvador. He then quotes Amnesty International as attributing most of the deaths in that campaign to government death squads. At the NYT this is called bolstering your argument. Anywhere else, it would be called destroying your own credibility. The vast majority of deaths in this war are atrocities committed by the insurgents. So the El Salvador analogy is bogus.

Then he pretends Biden knew what he was talking about when he challenged Codi. Biden was quoting a number that referred to Mosul and asserting it represented the entire country, which was 10X larger. This writer tries to make the difference look like well-trained troops vs. total troops. Biden was speaking out his anus, not discerning troop readiness levels. I skipped the last few pages as the writer lost all credibility in my eyes.