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Credo of a Sore Loser (poem)

By W. D. Ehrhart

(a cut & paste found poem)

Are you fucking kidding me?
Because we spurned the sacrifices
of our own soldiers, there is a real
chance that Baghdad will fall.
The American government made
gross errors, preventable errors like
not training and equipping
the Syrian freedom fighters,
giving al-Qaeda a new lease on life,
the renewed Sunni insurgency,
abandoning our allies in 1975,
Pakistan, Taliban, Afghanistan,
a threat greater than the fragile Iraqi
government can handle on its own,
but we would not pay the much
smaller price to secure the peace.
Although we accomplished little
on the ground, we managed
to succeed in the nick of time
until our negligence and dereliction
of duty pulled defeat from the jaws
of victory, an expedient
but short-sighted decision
reaping the instability and renewed
threat that we have sown, what
my friends fought and died for.
We fumbled the ball at the goal line.
Entirely predictable.

—W. D. Ehrhart