The US had no business invading Iraq in the first place. We toppled a dictatorship on a false 9/11 rationale. That plunged Iraq into a sectarian civil war inside a war with the United States. We left behind a vengeance-driven Shiite regime aligned with Iran. Now the sectarian war in Syria is enlarging into a regional one. The Sunni tribes we thought we defeated are taking over the north and pushing towards Baghdad. The primary blame for this disaster is on the Bush administration but also on all those who succumbed to a Superpower Syndrome, which said we could redesign the Middle East. Now some of the same people think we can salvage our reputation by bombing the Sunnis. The tragedy is that the neo-conservative “chicken hawks” who never fought but sent so many American soldiers to their young deaths, are going to blame Obama for “losing” the war. Sorry, but there is no reason whatsoever to justify further loss of American lives or tax dollars on a conflict which we do not understand and which started before the United States was born.

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