I'm Bill Moyers. It's good to have your ear.

Let's look at what U.S. military intervention in Iraq has achieved, in Afghanistan has achieved, in Somalia has achieved, in Lebanon has achieved, in Libya has achieved.

I mean, ask ourselves a very simple question.

Is the region becoming more stable? Is it becoming more democratic? Are we alleviating, reducing the

prevalence of anti-Americanism? I mean, if the answer is yes, then let's keep trying. But if the

answer to those questions is no, then maybe

it's time for us to recognize that this larger military project is failing and is not going to

succeed simply by trying harder. Thanks for joining us. They said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that could turn the smoking

gun into a mushroom cloud, and they were wrong.

They said Iraq had ties to al-Qaeda, and they were wrong.

They said the war would be a cakewalk, and they were wrong.

Over and again, they were wrong.

Yet 11 years, thousands of lives, millions of refugees, and trillions of dollars later, the very

same armchair warriors in Washington who, from the safety of their beltway bunkers, call for

invading Baghdad, are demanding once again that America

plunge into the sectarian wars of the Middle East. A chorus of kindred voices fills the echo

chamber, the same old faces, the same old arguments, never acknowledging the phony premises

and fraudulent intelligence that led to disaster

and chaos in the first place. A headline at the website Think Progress sums it up.

The people who broke Iraq have a lot of ideas about fixing it now. Among the most celebrated

of these hawks is Robert Kagan, senior fellow with the Brookings

institution, a darling of the neocons.

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