Thomas Mott Osborne: “I spent many years in coaching. Every Monday morning after a Saturday game, I got lots of mail telling me what I should…”

“I spent many years in coaching. Every Monday morning after a Saturday game, I got lots of mail telling me what I should have done. None of those letters helped me very much, because the game was over; hindsight was always perfect. And the was not what we should have done, but rather, what do we do now. And the same is true I think in regard to Iraq. We need to be proactive, not reactive. Like many Members of Congress, I have traveled to Iraq multiple times, and I met on one of these visits a young captain from Nebraska. This is what he said. He said that if we pull out prematurely, if we do not see this thing through, three things are going to happen. Number one, every soldier we have lost will have died in vain. I think what he says is true. I called a mother this morning whose son had just been killed. She was proud of her son. She was proud of the sense of mission he had. And I really hate to tell her that we are leaving, that he died in vain. Number two, tens of thousands of Iraqis will die as the nation implodes. This is what he said. And there may be hundreds of thousands. We will have broken our promise. We told them we would not pull out until we were ready and they were ready. And we cannot break our promise. And, third, we will put a huge bulls eye on our backs, because as terrorists feel that terrorism works, and that we will retreat in the face of terrorism, only more terrorism will result.…”