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It absolutely sickens me that I have lived long enough to see 60,000 American soldiers killed, hundreds of thousands maimed physically and emotionally through strategic, political, and military ineptness on the part of the federal government in Washington in Vietnam. And, now, we’ve seen it repeated in Iraq, Afghanistan, in Libya, Egypt, and apparently will also in Syria.

The older I get, the more I see that it is impossible to transfer our values of human life (when we believed in the value of human life), the values of human liberty and political/economic freedom, and the willingness to fight for it, to people of world views completely different from our own.

The Middle East will never embrace our views of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness because their world view prohibits such ideas. Their religion is squarely against it. Until that changes, nothing will improve there.

I admit, after 9/11 I was in favor of military action against those who perpetrated that heinous attack against us. I was also in favor of removing Saddam Hussein because he was blatantly funding and providing aid and support to terror activities/groups against Israel and the United States. In addition, he had flaunted every UN resolution that he supposedly agreed to at the end of the first Gulf War. Plus, everyone’s intelligence services - everyone’s - said he was developing WMD, and following 9/11, we could not take the chance that this was just a rumor.

Having said that. Though I think most Americans favored getting those who hurt us, and removing Saddam - I don’t think we were all for this “nation-building” thing that GW Bush wanted to do. That was one of the things that bothered me when we went into Iraq.

Though I can’t stand him now, I even credit Colin Powell telling W that if we invade Iraq, we’re going to “own it” for the next decade or so - he was absolutely correct.

We all saw that once the military victory was won, that the post-war period was completely bungled (it seemed there wasn’t a “post-war” plan in mind at all). But, even had that gone better, would things have turned out with a more positive result? I’m not sure that it would.

I know this is nothing new, but I think we should have just destroyed as much of the Taliban as possible, keep special forces on hand to eventually get Osama bin Laden, destroy Saddam Hussein’s regime, build up our intelligence assets in these countries, then get the heck out of there - with the clear understanding that if there were any further attacks on American Embassies or on the American homeland - we would blow to kingdom come whoever and wherever those responsible were.

Nation building was Bush’s big strategic mistake. It made victory near impossible.

Even worse still, Obama’s strategy seems to be, allow our worst enemies to get control in the Middle East, to reduce American credibility in the world, to reduce America’s moral credibility, reduce our military might, turn the CIA and NSA into masters of surveillance on American citizens rather than against our enemies, and to destroy Israel at the same time if possible.

As Mark Steyn said, the problem with attempting to establish some kind of victory in the Middle East is that “the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy”.