Opinion about Cambodian genocide in Phnom Penh - I have been there.....published in the Boston Globe

The Khmer Rouge, genocide, and justice

Echo opinion letter published in The Boston Globe:

Stephen Kinzer asserts that the term “genocide” is often used inappropriately in situations where it does not apply. 

I have been to Phnom Penh

My visit to the Killing fields in Cambodia

Accordingly, he recommends that it be dropped from our “political vocabulary.”

For example, Kinzer states that the Cambodian-on-Cambodian carnage committed by the Khmer Rouge during the 1970s should not be considered genocide because “there was no ethnic difference between killers and victims.”

True enough, considering that genocide involves an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Nevertheless, the widespread and systematic (horrendous) killings that took place in Cambodia did not go unpunished.

They resulted in the conviction of Khmer Rouge leaders for multiple crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. (But no real "Nuremburg" type of trial took place. 

In fact, the brutal leader of the genocide Pol Pot died mysteriously, probably the victim of purposeful euthanazia. Only one man was tried for the widespread "genocide".)

On the other hand, the large Vietnamese community living in Cambodia, in fact, was targeted for extermination, for which the Khmer Rouge head of state, Khieu Samphan, was tried and convicted of genocide by a United Nations-backed tribunal.

The tribunal’s Supreme Court Chamber, on which I sat, affirmed his conviction.

Whether or not genocide should be dropped from our political vocabulary, it continues to have an important place in our legal vocabulary.

From Phillip Rapoza in New Bedford, Massachusetts

The writer retired in 2015, as chief justice of the Massachusetts Appeals Court, after which he served as an international judge on the Supreme Court Chamber of the Khmer Rouge tribunal, formally known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia.

Studying history can mentor leadership ~ an Atlantic echo

The Iraq War and the Inevitability of Ignorance 

The focus is on the 1 percent who serve

By James Fallows in The Atlantic : an essay about leadership, and responsibility and the consequences of decision making, with a presidential focus. 

There’s a specific reason it is so hard to be president—in normal circumstances—and why most incumbents look decades older when they leave the job than when they began. The reason is that the only choices normal presidents get to make are the impossible ones—decisions that are not simply very close calls on the merits, but that are guaranteed to lead to tragedy and bitterness whichever way they go.

Take Barack Obama’s famed choice not to back up his “red line” promise in Syria, which was a focus of Jeffrey Goldberg’s “The Obama Doctrine” Atlantic cover story two years ago. The option Obama chose—not intervening in Syria—meant death and suffering for countless thousands of people. 

(Unfortunately, IMO) ...the option President Obama rejected—ie, intervening—would have meant death and suffering for countless thousands of the same people or others. 

Agree or disagree on the Syria outcome, any such decision is intellectually demanding and morally draining. Normal presidents have to make them, one after another, all day long. (

Why don’t presidents get any easier choices? 

Because someone else has made all of those before they get to the president. Obama’s decision to approve the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound turned out to be a tactical and political success. When he made it, he had to weigh the possibility that it could end in world-publicized failure—like Jimmy Carter’s decision to attempt a rescue of American hostages in Iran, which ended in chaos, and which Carter later contended was what sealed his fate in his re-election run.

A special category of impossible decision, which I was introduced to in the two years I worked for Jimmy Carter in the White House and have borne in mind ever since, turns on the inevitability of ignorance. To be clear, I don’t mean “stupidity.” 

People in the government and military are overall smarter than press portrayals might suggest. Instead I mean really registering the uncomfortable fact that you cannot know enough about the big choices you are going to make, before you have to make them.

Sometimes that is because of deadline rush: The clock is ticking, and you have to act now. (To give a famous example: In 1980 U.S. radar erroneously indicated that the Soviets had launched a nuclear-missile attack, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, as Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, had to decide at 3 a.m. whether to wake the president to consider retaliation. Before the world was rushed toward possible nuclear obliteration, the warning was revealed as a false alarm before Brzezinski could place the call.) 

Most of the time it is because the important variables are simply unknowable, and a president or other decision-maker has to go on judgment, experience, hunch.
This point sounds obvious, because we deal with its analogues in daily-life decisions big and small. No one who decides to get married can know what his or her spouse will be like 20 years in the future, or whether the partners will grow closer together or further apart. Taking a job—or offering one—is based at least as much on hope as on firm knowledge. You make an investment, you buy a house, you plan a vacation knowing that you can’t possibly foresee all the pitfalls or opportunities.

But this routine truism takes on life-or-death consequences in the choices that presidents must make, as commander in chief and as head of U.S. diplomatic and strategic efforts. The question of deciding about the unknowable looms large in my mind, as I think back 15 years to the run-up to the Iraq war, and think ahead to future such choices future presidents will weigh.

There’s a long list of books I wish presidents would have read before coming to office—before, because normal presidents barely have time to think once they get there. 

To give one example from my imagined list: the late David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace is for me a useful starting point for thinking about strains within the modern Middle East. 

Fromkin'sbook argues, in essence, that the way the Ottoman Empire was carved up at the end of World War I essentially set the stage for conflicts in the region ever since. In that way it is a strategic counterpart to John Maynard Keynes’s famous The Economic Consequences of the Peace, written just after the conclusion of the Versailles agreements, which argues that the brutal economic terms dealt out to the defeated Germans practically guaranteed future trouble there.

Also high up on my “wish they’d read” list is Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers, by two Harvard professors (and one-time mentors of mine), Ernest May and Richard Neustadt. In this book, May and Neustadt reverse the chestnut attributed to an earlier Harvard professor, George Santayana, that “those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Instead they caution against over-remembering, or imagining that a choice faced now can ever be exactly like one faced before.

The most famous and frightening example is Lyndon Johnson’s, involving Vietnam. Johnson “learned” so thoroughly the error of Neville Chamberlain, and others who tried to appease (rather than confront) the Nazis, that he thought the only risk in Vietnam was in delaying before confronting communists there. A complication in Johnson’s case, as this book and all other accounts of Vietnam make clear, is that he was worried both about the reality of waiting too long to draw a line against Communist expansion, and perhaps even more about appearing to be weak and Chamberlain-like.

Because of the disaster Johnson’s decisions caused—the disaster for Vietnam, for its neighbors, for tens of thousands of Americans, all as vividly depicted in last year’s Ken Burns / Lynn Novick documentary—most American politicians, regardless of party, “learned” to avoid entanglement in Asian-jungle guerrilla wars. 

Thus in the late 1970s, as the post-Vietnam war Khmer Rouge genocide slaughtered millions of people in Cambodia, the U.S. kept its distance. It had given up the international moral standing, and had nothing like the internal political stomach, to go right back into another war in the neighborhood where it had so recently met defeat.

From its Vietnam trauma, the United States also codified a crass political lesson that Richard Nixon had applied during the war. Just before Nixon took office, American troop levels in Vietnam were steadily on the way up, as were weekly death tolls, and monthly draft calls. The death-and-draft combination was the trigger for domestic protests. Callously but accurately, Nixon believed that he could drain the will to the protest if he ended the draft calls. 

Thus began the shift to the volunteer army—and what I called, in an Atlantic cover story three years ago, the “Chickenhawk Nation” phenomenon, in which the country is always at war but the vast majority of Americans are spared direct cost or exposure. (From the invasion of Iraq 15 years ago until now, the total number of Americans who served at any point in Iraq or Afghanistan comes to just 1 percent of the U.S. population.) ...

May and Neustadt had a modest, practical ambition for their advice to study history, but to study it cautiously. “Marginal improvement in performance is worth seeking,” they wrote. “Indeed, we doubt that there is any other kind. Decisions come one at a time, and we would be satisfied to see a slight upturn in the average. This might produce much more improvement [than big dramatic changes] measured by results.”

My expectation is more modest still: I fear but expect that the U.S. is fated to lurch from one over-“learning” to its opposite, and continue making a steadily shifting range of errors.

The decision to invade Iraq was itself clearly one of those. The elder George Bush fought a quick and victorious war to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in 1991. But he stopped short of continuing the war into Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power—and so his son learned from that “failure” that he had to finish the job of eliminating Saddam. (As did a group of the younger George Bush’s most influential advisors: Dick Cheney, who had been secretary of defense during the original Gulf war, and returned as George W. Bush’s vice president. Colin Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the first time around, and secretary of state the second. Paul Wolfowitz was undersecretary of defense during the first war, and deputy secretary of defense during the second. And so on.)

Two of the writers who were most eloquent in making their case for the war—Christopher Hitchens, who then wrote for the Atlantic among other places, and Michael Kelly, who was then our editor-in-chief—based much of their case on the evils Saddam Hussein had gotten away with after the original Gulf War. (Hitchens died of cancer in 2011; Kelly was killed in Iraq, as an embedded reporter in the war’s early stage.) Then Barack Obama, who had become president in large part because he opposed the Iraq war — which gave him his opening against the vastly better known and more experienced Hillary Clinton— learned from Iraq about the dangers of intervention in Syria. 

And on through whatever cycles the future holds.

Is there escape from the cycles? In a fundamental sense, of course not, no. But I’ll offer the “lesson” I learned—50 years ago, in a classroom with Professor May; 40 years ago, when I watched Jimmy Carter weigh his choices; 15 years ago, in warning about the risks of invading Iraq. 

It involves a cast of mind, and a type of imagination.

As the Bush administration moved onto a war footing soon after the 9/11 attacks, no one could know the future risks and opportunities. But, at the suggestion of my friend and then-editor Cullen Murphy, I began reporting on what the range of possibilities might be. Starting in the spring of 2002, when the Bush team was supposedly still months away from a decision about the war, it was clear to us that the choice had been made. I interviewed dozens of historians, military planners, specialists in post-war occupations, and people from the region to try to foresee the likely pitfalls.

The result, which was in our November, 2002 issue (and which we put online three months earlier, in hopes of affecting the debate) was called “The Fifty-First State?” Its central argument was: The “war” part of the undertaking would be the easy part, and deceptively so. The hard part would begin when U.S. troops had reached Baghdad and the statues of Saddam Hussein were pulled down—and would last for months, and years, and decades, all of which should be taken into consideration in weighing the choice for war.

It conceivably might have gone better in Iraq, and very well could have, if not for a series of disastrously arrogant and incompetent mistakes by members of the Bush team. 

Fallows wrote, "I won’t go into details here: I laid them out in several articles, including this, this, and this, and eventually a book. But the premise of most people I interviewed before the war, who mostly had either a military background or extensive experience in the Middle East, was that this would be very hard, and would hold a myriad of bad surprises, and was almost certain to go worse than its proponents were saying. Therefore, they said, the United States should do everything possible to avoid invading unless it had absolutely no choice. Wars should be only of necessity. This would be folly, they said, and a war of choice."

The way I thought of the difference between those confidently urging on the war, and those carefully cautioning against it, was: cast of mind. The majority of people I spoke with expressed a bias against military actions that could never be undone, and whose consequences could last for generations. I also thought of it as a capacity for tragic imagination, of envisioning what could go wrong as vividly as one might dream of what could go right. (“Mission Accomplished!”) ~ MaineWriter: Certainly, a wrong minded bravado, the mission has yet to "be accomplished.

Any cast of mind has its biases and blind spots. 

But Fallows writes about being impressed, in thinking about the history he has lived through and the histories read, by how frequently people with personal experience of war have been cautious about launching future wars. 

This does not make them pacifists: Harry Truman, artillery veteran of World War I, decided to drop the atomic bomb. But Ulysses Grant, Dwight Eisenhower, Colin Powell (in most of his career other than the Iraq-war salesmanship at the United Nations)—these were former commanding generals, cautious about committing troops to war. They had a tragic imagination of where that could lead and what it might mean.

What lesson do we end with? Inevitably any of them from the past will mismatch our future choices. The reasons not to invade Iraq 15 years ago are different from the risks to consider in launching a strike on North Korea or on Iran, or provoking China in some dispute in the East China Sea. The value of tragic imagination remains: for leaders considering war or peace, for the media in stoking or questioning pro-war fever, for the 99 percent of the public in considering the causes for which the military 1 percent will be asked to kill, and die.

Alt-right is in cult mentality - anecdotes urgently needed

Branding "alternative facts" and "fake news" as "lies"

Telling lies and re-branding them as "alternate facts" or "fake news" are becoming increasingly unbelievable; but a cultist's way to dismantle truth. Americans absolutely and unequivocally can't allow this double speak Orwellian processing of "untruth" to continue. Telling lies under any euphemism is still "telling lies".  HELLO?  Remember the cliche "If it walks like a duck"?

There are Biblical rules against telling lies. Bearing false witness is specifically addressed in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20 2-17. Deuteronomy 5:6-21).

Jesus proclaimed the righteous would be filled, as one of the 9 Beatitudes, as described by Matthew 5: 3-12. So, how is it that Christians, many Roman Catholics (including American Catholic Bishops) and Republicans who blindly support Donald Trump, continue to believe, support and repeat the lies his campaign built up into a sublime art form, without calling them "sins" or "falsehoods", or "untruths" or "false witness".

Perhaps you're not a Christian or a person who believes in Scripture, either Old or New Testament? For the secular person, here's the lexicon of synonyms in the Thesaurus associated with the word "lie". Along with the obvious synonyms, like "deceit" and "deception", some of the graphic "lie" associations include "forgery" and "whopper", among others. Check them out.

Consequently, the purpose of this blog is to explore my thoughts about how to compound an anecdote for the dangerous slippery slope of creating euphemisms for the practice of telling lies. "Alternative facts" are lies, the term is now viral and must be added to the Thesaurus. "Fake News" is clearly stated as being "not true"; but, incredulously, the "fake news" phenomenon has created cult believers! Donald Trump is the "Fake News Creator in Chief"! As a matter of fact, in the ethnographers world, where culture is examined by graphics and the written word, Trump gets the brand of being the "fake news" source, because he invented "birtherism", which is The Big Lie (a Joseph Goebbels concept) about President Barack Obama's birthplace.

So, how do we compound an anecdote for "alternative facts"? Obviously, a vaccine prevention or a verbal antibiotic cure isn't possible. Even more profound, the word "truth" doesn't penetrate into the "alternative facts" disease. It's like fighting the deadly Ebola virus, without using rubber gloves, because, eventually, the fake news germ will overcome voices demanding "proof" and "accountability". Right wing cultists can't believe in truth, unless they hear it couched in alternative facts and fake news.

Blogs, like Maine Writer (not intended to be a plug!) must be pervasive to pressure the Donald Trump cultists into producing evidence to sustain their fake news "lies".

In other words, just where are the millions of undocumented who voted when they weren't authorized to do so? This myth was created by the Trumpzi regime to erroneously rationalize how Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 2.8+ million votes.

Donald Trump really believes the National Association of Secretaries of State, in all 50 United States, conspired to allow from 3-5 million non-documented people to vote in the presidential election? Of course, Trump is delusional, but that's what makes "fake news" tangentially insidious. It's weird thinking gone "viral", crated by the delusional cult leader i.e. Donald Trump. 

Eventually, truth risks collapsing under the weight of the delusional cult phenomenon.

Visually, the highly successful "Women's March" on January 21st, was one anecdote; because, eventually, even the cult leader Donald Trump acknowledged the reality of the international movement.

So, here's my compound to anecdote the cult of alternative facts and fake news. We must respond to in real time, sustained by the light of truth. Although this sounds altruistic or simplistic, it's indeed a dangerous concoction, as millions of oppressed people who lived during the Cambodian Khmer Rouge genocide know, only too well.

Our anecdote for the alternative facts and fake news cottage industries, gone viral in the United States White House, must be adjudicated, challenged under the First Amendment and relentlessly reinforced by truth telling, at all levels of communication.

The Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes demand it of us.

This is America's time to stand firm for truth; but it will take a sustainability effort like nothing we've ever experienced in the past.

Aleppo and Cambodia

Frankly, when my husband and I visited Cambodia in 2011, we were both surprised when our guide explained the reason the evil Khmer Rouge gained such a stranglehold on the nation during their reign of terror, known as the "Killing Fields". She told us the massive slaughters of Cambodians by their own people, led by a cruel dictator named Po Pot (1925-1998), happened because the United States left Vietnam in chaos and the Khmer Rouge filled the void in Cambodia. This logic was beyond my understanding. Weren't the Cambodia people victimized by the leader Po Pot and his followers? I didn't think the Americans had much, if anything, to do with his murderous campaign.  

Po Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge (1925-1998)

Well, now CNN is reporting that the lack of US involvement in Syria has, likewise, led to a leadership vacuum in the Middle East and this resulted in the tragic fall of Aleppo.  

When the US steps back, terrible actors fill the void
Barack Obama became president vowing to extricate the United States from the Middle East. He tried to stay out of Syria and even sounded proud of it. His failure to act even after warning of a "red line" if Assad used chemical weapons -- which Assad has continued to do -- sent a signal to other powers that the field was open. The vacuum created by the US was quickly filled by Russia, Iran and Arab governments. Now, we see not only the calamity of Aleppo, but hundreds of thousands killed, millions of refugees in Europe, the rise of the extreme anti-immigrant right and the empowering of Russia and Iran. Obama's policy did not just fail. It allowed this worst-case scenario to materialize.

Huh? Well, these two logic scenarios just don't make any sense. Obviously, I'm not an international scholar, but in both tragedies, the carnage was caused by the nation's governments turning on its own people. Po Pot was Cambodian- he murdered millions of Cambodians. Similarly, President Assad, the evil leader of Syria, is murdering millions of his nation's citizens.

In both tragedies, the risk of intervening in Cambodia or, decades later, in  Syria, would have had the same consequences. In other words, to prevent both massacres, the weird logic called for Americans to be interventionists. When Cambodian people became victims of Po Pot, they had the power, by sheer numbers, to destroy the evil man. Eventually, the Vietnamese army intervened in Cambodia to end the carnage, but only one person was ever tried and executed for the Khmer Rouge terror. Unbelievably, even Po Pot died in a hospital, albeit under somewhat mysterious circumstances.  

In Syria, one man is responsible for the genocide of millions of his own people. Although Assad is propped up by Russian President Putin, the fact is, the 12.5 million displaced Syrians who are victims of this alliance had the capacity to overtake the power base in the capital, in Damascus.

Of course, I sincerely regret sounding like my intention is to somehow blame the innocent victims who were murdered by Po Pot in Cambodia and by Assad in Syria. That is certainly not the purpose of this blog. Rather, I'm failing to understand a logic whereby, both the guide who spoke to us in Cambodia and now the CNN pundit, are in agreement about how lack of American involvement contributed to two international genocides. 

Perhaps I'm conjuring up an image of waves of humans creating an avalanche of unified resistance to evil leaders, regardless of how many get massacred in the process. Yet, in both countries, in my opinion, the lack of populist opposition has caused exactly the same outcomes.

Moreover, potential American involvement in Cambodia post the end of the Vietnam War (or, as the Vietnamese call it "the War of American Aggression") would have contributed to even more casualties. In Syria, an American intervention would have involved our nation's military and probably even roused more support for terrorism from ISIS and other radical religious zealots.  

Therefore, I disagree with the CNN report about the vacuum created by lack of American involvement in Syria contributing to the fall of Aleppo.  

These are the facts: President Assad is responsible for the cruel destruction of his own, once beautiful, Syrian nation. In Cambodia, it was Po Pot who murdered his own people during the reign of the Khmer Rouge during the "Killing Fields". Two individual and mortal men who were both motivated by evil to destroy their own people.  Period.

In my logic, Americans had little, if anything, to do with either one.

Islamic State wants to paint the Middle East black: genocide has another evil perpetrator with Hitler, Po Pot etc.

Horrible litany of genocide continues in the evil tradition of Adolf Hitler's Nazism in Germany and Po Pot's Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.  

Even Osama Bin Laden and his evil legacy seems to pale in the wake of the evil perpetrated by Abu Bakr as-Baghdadi.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, CEO

On 4 October 2011, the US State Department listed al-Baghdadi as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist and announced a reward of up to US$10 million for information leading to his capture or death. Only Ayman al-Zawahiri, chief of the global al-Qaeda organization, merits a larger reward (US$25 million).

As a perpetrator of unmitigated evil, Abu_Bakr has perpetrated, genocide and random slaughter of people deemed not to be Muslim enough. It appears he has even put forth a strategic plan for the group ISIS.  In a nutshell, his plan succinctly reported by Al Jazeera is to turn the entire Middle East "black". In other words, Abu Bakr wants the evil of ISIS to be displayed in black robes, endless yards of bleak women burkas and even painted on the faces of retail manikins.  

When Nazism engulfed Europe in the 1930s and 40s , the reaction of the western world was to eradicate the evil by destroying the entire movement. After the war, a relentless routing of Nazi war criminals became an obsession.

Likewise, when the Khmer Rouge murdered millions of Cambodians, the result was for the East Asian nations, including Vietnam, to destroy the evil. Nevertheless, little has been done to prosecute the perpetrators of the genocide after the Cambodian monarchy was reinstated.

It's difficult to understand how Muslims will stand up to one of their own, even when the demon is as horrifically evil as Abr-Bakr. Meanwhile, Christians and Jews are the most vulnerable to the horror of advancing and radically evil ISIS terror.  

Nevertheless, just like the Europeans had to eventually confront Nazism and the Asians had to oppose the Khmer Rouge,  evil in the Middle East must be decimated. Otherwise, ambiguity in the face of evil is like a welcome mat for ISIS to move forward with even more horrific reports of beheading violent acts against humanity. 

ISIS must be destroyed and thereby prevented from declaring a Muslim Black Nation. It will take a strong and united Middle East leadership coalition to accomplish what must be done before the sheer terror of ISIS consumes the Middle East, like a firestorm.  

Unfortunately, Americans came to think the world was rid of evil when Saddam Hussein was toppled, and Osama Bin Laden was captured and killed.  Instead, those two evil monsters seemed to have begot a bad  seed progeny in the person of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Iraqi government is useless the Middle East is deteriorating at every turn

When George Bush 43 launched his illegal American led invasion of Iraq, he sincerely believed his order for the assault was in response to a higher calling. President Bush believed he was destined to eliminate a cruel President Saddam Hussein from his tyrannical control over his Iraqi nation. So, Saddam Hussein was eliminated, but the dictator's "weapons of mass destruction" did not exist. America invaded a sovereign nation without cause and killed the leader Saddam Hussein, labeled as evil, because we said so. 

Oh, and by the way, Americans also protected the Iraqi oil fields from being destroyed and burned down.

Now, in the absence of weapons of mass destruction, the real evil in Iraq has erupted in the presence of a group named ISIS (whatever that means). What I know of ISIS is that it's a dark euphemism for unbelievable evil, perpetrated on innocent people who are not them. In other words, ISIS is taking over anything and everything in their relentless path towards annihilation of whatever they want to destroy. ISIS is the weapon of mass destruction George Bush never found, only more unbelievably destructive and evil. These ISIS evildoers take no prisoners. Rather, they kill indiscriminately.

Evil is consuming the Middle East as I write this blog, while the Iraqi government cowers in the American taxpayer paid for "Green Zone", inside the nation's capital of Baghdad.

What all this evil and accompanying destruction boils down to is that the US invasion of Iraq, where thousands were killed and tens of thousands of civilians were slaughtered, was a  colossal failure. Moreover, the war was a total waste of human lives and obscene waste of tax payer money, ie, like 2 trillion dollars of waste. 

Meanwhile, the American government has been unable to claim any victory whatsoever in Iraq, except for the day when Saddam Hussein was toppled during a symbolic gesture of tearing down his statue.  

Tonight, August 8th, President Obama announced the launching of American military air attacks to defend our nation's interests against an implosion of the Iraqi government. Also, we want to help protect an innocent and ancient religious cult, who are being slaughtered by ISIS. 

In other words, America is at war again in Iraq. This carnage will not end until a coalition of Middle East leaders determine how to live in peace. It's a huge challenge because ISIS is just like the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Nazis in Germany. They must be eradicated, once and for all.  Unfortunately, as Americans enter these heinous conflicts, the local people sit back and watch the outcomes. Therefore, at some point, Americans must either eradicate our enemies or leave them to their own destruction. In other words, "fish or cut bait".  

After too many years engaged in a failed Iraqi War, it's time for Americans to figure out what it is we want to do. Sadly, I submit we just don't have an answer.