I am in total agreement with this. As I watched David Petraeus's captioned interview yesterday on CNN, my thought was "he's crazy." Yes, as crazy as those Beltway insiders, the ones who did not listen in 2005 and will not listen in 200? to the majority opinion of their own citizens (let alone the world's opinion) on the matter of Iraq and the larger question of how the US should act in the world. I'd add this observation to Engelhardt's: an American 7-year-old in 2001, now 14, has lived half their life in a nation at war. They cannot have possibly avoided hearing controversial opinions and twisted rationalizations and seeing pictures of the death and destruction. Like the Iraqi children, they have been formed by this ill-conceived "war of choice" and ill-fated "war on terror." When Tom Engelhardt and I are no longer around to make predictions, the children of the US, Iraq, Afghanistan and all the other countries that have lived under the crush of US military power will be running the world. One thing we can't predict is how they will interact. We can only hope and pray that they will be able to forgive, reconcile and find peace. Otherwise, I predict the they will be celebrating the Nth anniversary of...

Tom Hardenbergh

Bath, MI

Our antiwar folks talk about our loses, human and material, what we might have accomplished at home without this war and how the war has hurt America's reputation and economy.

But no one really makes the most important point: we have taken a country that was fairly properous by Middle Eastern standards and rather throughly destroyed its people, its infrastructure, its monuments and its life. There is no way withdrawal will be enough. We shall be morally and politically obligated to help Iraq for decades, despite its oil wealth.

How can Americans live with themselves having destroyed a nation for no reason?

Norman Ravitch

Savannah, GA