Good bread’n’butter speech. Just a couple of nits to pick:
(1) “There is no higher calling than service in our armed forces.” That would ring a little less hollow if this country’s ruling classes were better represented in the military. In fact the military is a lower-middle-class and working-class occupation, which U.S. elites avoid like the plague.
(2) The argument that we should not set a time limit on our presence in Iraq, because “the enemy would wait us out.” Perhaps they would. There’s another side to this, though. A reader whose work is to get franchise operations up and running tells me it’s **KEY** to have some definite date when his guys withdraw and let the franchisee take over. If you don’t do that, the psychological dependence never gets broken — the training wheels never come off. That sounds right to me. Putting together a working army and police force doesn’t take THAT long, if the motivation is there. Six month’s training is fine for combat troops. Yet here we are in year three.
Perhaps a withdrawal date would concentrate Iraqi minds. Frankly, they don’t seem all that concentrated right now.