Foreign Affairs
The Eight-Year-Old’s Iraq Twenty years after the Iraq invasion: It was the last period of true optimism, with a sense that somewhere in the unknown unknowns we would meet destiny.
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I was an avid supporter of the Iraq invasion in 2003. I believed that Saddam Hussein was a tyrant and a danger to American interests; I believed that, as a civilization, we had a God-given mission to the world, helping those we’ve subdued and warring down the still-arrogant. We beat Nazism; we beat communism; now it was time to beat radical Islam (although the “radical” got left...