I am roughly three decades too young to remember the the Tet Offensive, the fall of Saigon, or the many other horrors of the Vietnam War but I have seen many of the Walter Cronkite Vietnam War archive series. The similarities are scary.

Urban warfare is horrific. It is become more so as the technology is becoming more advanced and deadly. When we are fighting guerrilla wars it's even nastier. And it's even nastier when we are stuck in the middle of a civil war.

Imagine living in those cities, those kinds of lives. Going to school in hearing gunshots and being in fear of being kidnapped, injured, or killed. Your historic and beautiful landscapes have been defiled. The infrastructure that your tax dollars paid for or the US helped pay in the form of rebuilding your country destroyed. For no good reason.

I could never understand why people would go to war over such things. I might get mad at my neighbors, but I don't send a rocket propelled grenade towards their house. There are lawful ways to deal with disputes that work far better and don't cause the level of destruction we are seeing in Iraq.

I don't dispute that the late Saddam Hussein was a horrible person. Yet, compared to what we have over there now you have to question the wisdom of us taking him out. He already well checked by the nations around him. You also have to question the wisdom of going to war.

It's time to get out. I don't know how we will do it, but it's time to get out and focus on our problems at home. We simply can not afford to be keeping Iraq as it is and it's time for a change. It's a mess but without clear solutions on how to clean it up.