I would have voted 'no' on the Iraq war and 'yes' to Afghanistan.

The Iraq war was not necessary.

My point here is not that the Iraq War was a bad idea in the first place (though it certainly was). My point is that this cynical, foolish, arguably illegal war might still have come right in the end—if only we had tried a little less hard to fix everything that struck us as broken.

Each day had the same bloody rhythm: mortars at dawn, car bombs by 11: 00 a.m., drive-by shootings before tea, and mortars again at dusk. At night the death squads went to work.

People are going to die," he said flatly. "It's statistics." Then he got up and left the room.

I remember. A gunship’s crew laughing before mowing down reporters and civilians - in short bursts. A truck crossing a shadowy bridge, seconds before it explodes along with those inside the pressroom, as the general declares the driver “the luckiest man in Bagdad.”Our military - using attack helicopters and night scopes – to spray bullets at fleeing soldiers, like roaches running from a giant can of Raid. The pressroom laughs again. It’s not funny and there lies the rub.

In a place of extreme violence and devoid of order, the practical subsumes the principle. I drifted down the path of bribery and corruption endemic to the streets of Baghdad

It smelled like a slaughterhouse. I was standing in the interrogation room of Saddam Hussein's Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad. A stench of blood and death permeated my senses, my clothes, my being.

I became amazed at how much my men would tolerate if someone just took the time to explain the why of it all to them.

I believed removing Saddam from power was the right thing to do at the time, and I was also motivated by 9/11. Weapons of mass destruction or not, Saddam had murdered and displaced millions of his own countrymen and was funding suicidal terror operations against the state of Israel…