I recall during the greatest heat of the war in Iraq seeing TV interviews with one parent after another of a dead American soldier, saying that they didn’t want the U.S. to pull out of Iraq because that meant their child would have died for no reason. It would have been a cruel thing to tell them that their loved one was lost for no reason regardless, that a surge wasn’t going to mean anything in Iraq in the long run, that it was just meant to help the White House save face. Perhaps because more weren’t willing to say the truth aloud–or maybe because not too many would listen anyhow–the same thing kept happening to other soldiers and their parents. And, of course, we hardly ever heard from the family of the perhaps 100,000 Iraqi dead. 

From “Tell Me Again, Why Did My Friends Die In Iraq?” a pained, exasperated Business Insider piece by USMC veteran Paul Szoldra:

“The invasion of Iraq was predicated on the notion of ridding the Hussein regime of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ of course. But in 2004, the game was changed to counterinsurgency — ridding the world of “the terrorists.”

And we sure were successful. Until the U.S. pulled out, American soldiers and Marines certainly killed their fair share of terrorists, insurgents, bad guys, and the like. They in turn, killed plenty of us.

Yet for all the blood spilled — of 4,488 military men and women to be precise — there’s no good reason why.

The proof of how pointless the entire endeavour was — if you even needed more — came Friday morning, with a report from Liz Sly in the Washington Post.

‘At the moment, there is no presence of the Iraqi state in Fallujah,’ a local journalist who asked not to be named because he fears for his safety told Sly. ‘The police and the army have abandoned the city, al-Qaeda has taken down all the Iraqi flags and burned them, and it has raised its own flag on all the buildings.’

Fallujah has fallen, and the same scenario is about to happen in the even-larger city of Ramadi.

It shouldn’t be such a surprise the place my friends fought for is falling back into civil war. I shouldn’t be surprised when the same thing happens in Afghanistan. But it still is, because I don’t want it to happen.”