General Mattis has a line that he likes to say, which is, it's not just should the American military do the right thing, but doesn't have the capability to do the right thing.

And so I do think that there was like an argument you could have made saying, listen, we're not built for this. We don't have the infrastructure,

we don't have the expertise or whatever to really handle something this mass of a project of

dealing with Iraq that has been broken by a Saddam Hussein.

That's a fair point to make, but it doesn't relieve you again of like,

okay, but how are you going to deal with this big Saddam Hussein problem. 20 years ago this past week on March 19th 2003 the United States invaded Iraq

marking the second time the US fought a war in Iraq in just over a decade.

It commenced a conflict that resulted in the deaths of over 4,000 members of the US military and injured many more and of course

there are the staggering number of Iraqi lives lost. This war and the subsequent

occupation and the surge in Iraq in 2007, all of these events in Iraq and

others had cascading effects on our troops, their families, and the Iraqi people and the

broader Middle East.

It shook up geopolitics globally.

How should we think about the decisions leading up to during and after the initial

invasion? What is the legacy of that experience? What is the legacy for U.S. foreign policy for the Middle East

and for the intersection of U.S. politics

and American foreign policy?

It's a topic that I'll be returning to from time to time because it continues to have considerable implications for America's role in the world.

I was personally involved in some of these events, having served in a civilian role for the Pentagon in Doha and then in Baghdad in 2003 and 2004.

Journalist Eli Lake traveled to Iraq six times, the first time when I was there in my US government role and he was there as

recently as the past few years so he's been reporting on the full arc of

America's engagement in Iraq. Eli's a contributing editor to Commentary magazine and a columnist for the

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