Lynn C. Woolsey: “it has been almost 39 months since our troops were sent to Iraq; and today, more than 37 months after the President…”

“it has been almost 39 months since our troops were sent to Iraq; and today, more than 37 months after the President declared their mission accomplished, they are still there, still fighting a guerrilla war for which they weren't properly trained or equipped, still paying for the tragic blunders of their civilian superiors, and still risking life and limb because of a security threat that never even existed. If American troops are still in Iraq at year's end, and, unfortunately, it appears they might be, we will have been in Iraq longer than these soldiers' grandfathers fought in World War II. The difference is that that was a much different war, with a clearer objective, a national consensus, a moral core, and a just cause. Not only has Iraq not made us safer; it has actually harmed our national security, making the United States an international pariah, provoking the range of anti-American jihadists around the Muslim world, and stoking the fires of an insurgency that gets stronger every day, every day that we are in Iraq. And that doesn't even take into account the staggering human cost, the 2,500th American soldier killed just yesterday, more than 1,800 soldiers gravely wounded, thousands of others mentally and physically traumatized by their combat experience, not to mention the countless tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians who died for the cause of their own so-called liberation. Mr.…”