Despite being total failures, the same people responsible for the Iraq War
still dominate the foreign policy of both the Democratic and Republican Parties.
As a Republican U.S. Senator I would work to remove them from all national influence.
A decade ago my old friend Bill Odom, the three-star general who ran the National
Security Agency for Ronald Reagan, publicly declared that the Iraq War was the
“greatest strategic disaster in US history”.
He was exactly correct then, and his judgment seems even more prescient today,
as the rise of the Islamic State and other powerful extremist groups has led
to an endless cycle of war and terrorism in the Middle East, now directly threatening
European and American cities. Furthermore, prominent economists have estimated
that the long-term cost of the war to our country may run as high as five trillion
dollars.
Most of our recent foreign wars in the Middle East area, under both the Bush
and the Obama Administrations, have been expensive and immoral foreign policy
disasters. Republicans Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan were right about these issues,
as were all the other experts, both liberal and conservative, who have been
saying the same thing.