I’d stay up all night agonizing over sentence structure and whether the group was going far enough in calling for an end to the war. The first sentence of the report said “the situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating,” and the report called for a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops. Instead, Bush put more troops into the country. To me, the experience clarified two things: First, the people who were supposed to know better had gotten us into a moral and strategic disaster; second, you can’t change things unless you change the people making the decisions. I had a decent policy job, but I
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