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Even many folks who know damn well that the war has been a failure -- and who never would have believed in 2003 that it would have unfolded this way -- will never openly admit it.

How has the war been a failure? The only place the war has failed is in the minds of the Democrats ... and in your mind, apparently.

Goals of the war:
Remove Saddam Hussein from power ... check
Establish a freely elected leadership ... check
Rebuild Iraqi infrastructure (Where Saddam built palaces, we build schools) ... check
Train and equip police/army to defend the new country ... working on it

The biggest goal in the war that wasn't achieved was securing the WMD. Clearly those went to Syria, probably with the aid of the Russians, prior to the start of the war.

But the bodies of terrorists continue to pile up in Iraq - many or most of whom are foreign terrorists who have come to Iraq because they want to fight Americans.

Politically, the war has turned sour, but the ultimate goals of preventing Iraq from becoming a state sponsor of terror and of developing a democracy that might be a spark in the Middle East are goals that are still achievable if our will doesn't break. But the naysayers, who claim the war is already lost and who whine that it's a failure will absolutely undermine our nation's interests and the soldiers on the ground if they can.

If you want to see true failure, pull out the troops now and watch Iraq dissolve into a civil war where Taliban-like terrorists take over and provide al Qaeda and the like with a nation base - just like they had in Afghanistan - sponsored by Iran.

You're working off the talking points of the MSM (talk about a lot "invested" in the failure of the war). The MSM's talking points didn't fly with me four years ago, and they don't fly now.

All this talk about "freely elected leadership," "rebuilding Iraqi infrastructure," and training a police/military force to "defend the new country" is a lot of nonsense, when you consider that Iraq isn't even a real country anymore (not that it ever was).

Great -- then level the place to the ground and start all over again. There's no reason to have U.S. troops building a dysfunctional nation in a Third World sh!t-hole thousands of miles away.

I hate to break this to you, but Iraq has already dissolved into a simmering civil war -- with U.S. troops serving as "peacekeepers" among people who don't have even a simple understanding of what a free country is.

Here's the only quote that matters, as far as I'm concerned . . .

"Well, just as it’s important, I think, for a president to know when to commit U.S. forces to combat, it’s also important to know when not to commit U.S. forces to combat. I think for us to get American military personnel involved in a civil war inside Iraq would literally be a quagmire. Once we got to Baghdad, what would we do? Who would we put in power? What kind of government would we have? Would it be a Sunni government, a Shi’a government, a Kurdish government? Would it be secular, along the lines of the Ba’ath Party? Would be fundamentalist Islamic? I do not think the United States wants to have U.S. military forces accept casualties and accept the responsibility of trying to govern Iraq. I think it makes no sense at all." --- Dick Cheney, U.S. Secretary of Defense, 4/7/91

Someone needs to explain to me why the same Dick Cheney who thought it was a terrible idea to invade Iraq in 1991 -- when the U.S. and its coalition had 500,000 troops in the region -- yet somehow decided it would be feasible to do it in 2003 with only 130,000+ troops.