From our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. I believe that by next summer, you will see significant improvements in security. Forces will begin to flow. By this time one year from now i believe i will be able to tell you that this strategy is clearly working. General mcchrystal is here. He played a key role in iraq and afghanistan. He was instrumental in the capture of Saddam Hussein and the killing of abu mossad said cowie. His memoir has just been released in paperback. It comes at a time when iraq and afghanistan are both facing renewed insurgencies. Want to talk about many things including where you are today and where you are going forward, but also look back at where you have some advantage of experience and insight. Afghanistan. Where are we, in your judgment, on the ground there as they prepare to leave most troops by 2014, and maybe all . I think that militarily or security wise there have been a lot of gains made, and those gains are shown on the ground in the relative life of the people. I think in terms of government, there have been big problems. Internal to the afghan government, there has been a real difficulty in getting local governments adequate, local, competent administration, technocrats down to low levels, which builds the confidence of the people. At the national level, there has been a real problem with them being a credible government. It is not impossible, but it has been a real challenge. I think the Afghan People have moved to a different place. I think particularly young people, not just those in school we talk so much about, but those who maybe have graduated from school, afghan females and a lot of other afghans are not ready to go back in time. They are not ready to go back to pre9 11, pre1990, pre1978. When people talk about afghanistan and what will happen in the future, they immediately pull out a history book and say this is what will happen. I think it is a different afghanistan. It is still fraught with dangers because political weakness could break into violence. I dont think the taliban could take over. I dont think they are strong enough, but i think there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty and the Afghan People are plagued by the what happens next question. What kind of mistakes did the allies make in afghanistan . A number. I am going to include afghans in our allies. If we go back just to 9 11 and say we went in unexpectedly after the al qaeda elements that were there, we suddenly found ourselves having toppled the taliban government without having really thought what next. Now we have a country that had been through about 20 years of war at that point. It was badly damaged and very little infrastructure or personal capital, into Human Capital in terms of government or whatnot, and we thought we could do things more cheaply than we did. We thought the germans would do the police, the italians would do the courts, the americans would do the army and a few other things and we would slide out. That was not realistic. It was going to take a huge effort. In our haste and sometimes our ignorance, we allowed a number of nontraditional leaders, warlords in many cases, to gather economic, political, and sometimes military power. We allowed them to get into places, sometimes where they had been before, and what that signal to the afghan population was that, here we go again. We are going back to the bad old days that really are what preceded the taliban. The Afghan People said if we are just leaving the taliban, we are going to go back to what we hated pretaliban. We lost confidence among many afghans during the 20012004 period. The taliban saw opportunity. They came back in and said look at what is happening. Youre going back to the bad old days and americans are not going to solve the problem. They started to find fertile ground, not in huge places, but slowly. They were able to grow their political power, and some cases, military. We made a mistake of not seeing that soon enough and not reacting to it enough when we did. We were under resourced in many ways. Probably we were most under resourced and understanding. We did learn the language enough. We didnt take a longterm, consistent approach to it. We did not leave a force there. Do you believe if there had been a residual force of perhaps 10,000 people or more soldiers that we would not see the conflict we see today . There is no way to guarantee that, but the chances are we would have a better situation than we have now. I think it couldve been a factor that would have given the sunnis more confidence that they would have the ability to be more fairly and perhaps persuade the Prime Minister of that as well. We certainly lost a tremendous amount of our leverage with the Prime Minister when we were gone. I understand the desire to be gone, but it also signaled to the region that we had touched the stove and it was too hot and we were going to withdraw our hands. While we do not want to stay places with huge numbers of people, we must stay engaged. If we had left a residual force, what would they have done . I think they largely would have done training of iraqi forces, Logistical Support and things, but to a certain degree, they also would have then a demonstrated commitment, a demonstrated partnership. The president prepared to negotiate to keep residual forces there. It wasnt like we did not want to have them. It was that the negotiations, as i understand it, were unsuccessful. That is my understanding as well. And they may be under successful in afghanistan. They may be indeed. And the Iraqi Foreign minister is saying to afghanistan, do not make the mistake we did. Keep some forces there. But they may. Which brings me to this question. You were one of the people who had a relationship with hamid karzai. I dont understand why after all this he still seems either he is just purely political and perhaps corrupt likely corrupt, and yet, after all america has done he would not be in power without america. He seems so resentful. There is a saying, give somebody something in the first somebody something and the first person they hate is you. There was a paper during the vietnam war that said the paradox of counterinsurgency is the client state that you are helping is soon finds itself less committed to it than you. The donor cares more than the recipient. In the case of afghanistan, there are a number of things at work. They are trying to come to grips with imminent abandonment. Theyre trying to steel themselves to be emotionally and physically prepared. Because that happened before. Correct. I think president karzai and i i certainly would not presume to do a psychological study, but he does not want to be portrayed as a puppet. As washingtons man. Thats right. He also thinks that in the future of afghanistan, he is going to have to be very independent and not dance to our fiddle. On the other hand, he has also had enough of a painful relationship over what is now many years. From 2001 that is the long time to operate out of the palace. It is very difficult for him to travel. It is a long time for him to be going through this endless cycle is of state, generals, ambassadors, and to find that in many cases he thinks that he hasnt been listened to or respected. Respect is a big thing. Its a huge thing, and if you look at that and over time he gets increasingly frustrated with that, and he is human. The hamid karzai i knew was a good man. He was a rational man. But he was a human. Anhe h all the frustrations and responses that other people so how did you, as the general who came to see him, give us the secret, or at least your own sense of how you should engage him by showing him respect, by trying to gain his confidence, by trying to disavow him of his worst instincts . I have no secret. It is just dealing with people. The first thing was view him as an elected leader of a nation, not as a client of the United States who was dependent on us. He is the sovereign leader of a nation. When i went to see him the first time, it was not tradition for americans to be in anything but our battle uniform. I wore my dress green uniform to show him respect. I also tried to communicate to him that not only was this his nation, this was his war. I was the commander of american troops, but i supported the afghan fight. He never viewed it as his war. He viewed it as something they were reluctantly allowing the west to fight on their territory. I tried to convince him that this is a war for national survival. This is your war. You have to play a role as commanderinchief in doing that. I made efforts to establish that. There were times that i am sure he would like me to do differently, but i believe that by working as hard as we did on the relationship, there were also times when we each did differently than our instincts might have been to maintain the relationship. The goal was to strengthen that to the point where he trusted me as a person and trusted me as a military commander, and i could be a good support for our ambassador, our secretary of state, our president and whatnot. And there has never been a strong Central Government in afghanistan ever. That makes a Central Governments task that much more challenging. Thats right. If you are president karzai, you dont have a political party. You dont have an automatic base of support. You are trying to triangulate between a number of different interests and foreigners, western interest, and the taliban. You are trying to balance between all of these, not going so far to one that the others become enemies. What are the three or four things you think are essential to communicate to annapolis and the air force academy, and to say the same thing to future military leaders . The first is we tend to think of war, and we tend to think we are going to conquer a piece of ground. War is about people. The army that wins is the one that thinks it has won. The one that is losing is the one that thinks it has lost. And the population decides which one wins. And that is very counterintuitive when you try to take an imperial look at war. So thats the first thing. Its about people. Youre not just moving stuff. Youre influencing people. The second is we say the general must have a great strategy. In reality, i have come to believe you could do strategy pretty quickly. You and i could sit here in an hour and come up with a workable strategy. The genius is implementing it. To implement it, you have to do a number of things. First, you have to articulate it clearly and constantly. And have it understood. People have to believe that you are committed to it and that you will provide the kind of focus if you state your strategy differently every day, they wait until the next day to hear the one they like. They withhold action. They have to believe it is consistent. They have to believe they are part of it. You have to convince people, your soldiers, your civilians and people that this is a strategy that they not only will benefit from but that they must contribute to. They dont want to see general mcchrystals strategy. They want to see our strategy, and they have to accept that. It becomes a people exercise at every level. The last i would say is it is about building trust. If there is anything i have come to believe and i go back and i look at the 2004 dream team. You say i am going to build a great team and so you say go get great talent. That does not equal a great team. A great team does have a component of talent, but the other component is what i call shared consciousness, which is a combination of trust, common purpose, and informed, contextual understanding, so together this entity believes in the same thing and understands is informed enough to do that well. Then you put this together and suddenly you have the necessary ingredients to have a truly effective team. If you build a great team and reinforce that, you can do just about anything. If you dont focus on the team part, no matter how brave the strategy is, youre likely not to do well. As we saw with the first dream team. And they changed to a Second Dream Team because of a different coach. Let me get your take on this, the idea that the president , who supported the surge, and that you had recommended from the field some Different Levels of troops that might be necessary, 70,000, whatever the numbers were, and you know them. And then there had been much debate and the president talked and listened to a lot of people, and then there was the leak of a memo. Some people thought it came from you or people around you because they wanted to make the case publicly for what they felt was needed to do the job. Who leaked the memo, and do you think it had a devastating impact or a Significant Impact on the relationship between the president and his generals in the field, especially you . I know that i didnt leak it, and i am almost 100 sure nobody on my staff did. We had started work on that in june. We finished in early august. Then it was back in d. C. For about three weeks. We had no reason to leak it because in fact once it was leaked it made my job and our job much harder. We were much better to have the president and his team with a chance to digest it. I absolutely think the speculation is completely incorrect. I dont know who did it. Would you want to know or not very much . Not very much at this point. These leaks are so damaging because what they do is undercut trust. They changed the debate shouldve been about what was in the assessment. The discussion shouldve been about because i gave the assessment in two pieces. The first piece was here is the assessment of the situation. Here is what we have to do if we want to succeed. I didnt put anything about troops in there. I said you must change the way we fight this war or we will fail. If you accept this assessment, if you accept these conclusions, then look at part two, and part two said these are the resources required, but dont do the resourcing if you dont believe the first part, because it will be good money after bad. So, as we did this, we were very careful to try to make sure that people understood that we were not giving a judgment on the war. I said to my staff, think of us as auto mechanics. We dont own the car, but we know what it will take to get the car in working order. Try to be dispassionate. I think we did an effective job of that. Bob gates has said that the president sent men and women into battle without supporting the mission. It seems the president had questions and was skeptical. Is this working . If it is working, how do you explain this . I would hope the general would say that to his lieutenants, would you not . It really did force the discussion. Not all parts of it were comfortable or done perfectly, but i thought that level of focus on what are we trying to do and what is it going to take to do it was very healthy. Bob gates says he supported all the president s decisions with respect to afghanistan. Did you . Yes. I was asked whether i recommended announcing a july 11 beginning of pulling forces out, but i told him, he asked me pointblank, can you accept that, and i said i could. Everyone is trying to understand the president and leadership on a whole range of foreign and domestic issues. Give me your sense of him as a leader and as a commander in chief. I have a very limited aperture on the president. What i have found was he had thought very analytically about afghanistan from the beginning. I think he was frustrated because as he was trying to understand that he was being given a drumbeat of decisions that had to be made before he had time to completely internalize what the situation was. I think he was being asked to make another commitment almost the day he took over. I think that caused frustration and it caused him to be skeptical that people were trying to push him too fast. The problem was events in the battlefield pushed that. I think he had a natural lack of familiarity with how the military works. Anyone would. That is not a criticism. Anyone who deals with a different culture or group of people, it takes a while to get that. If you are doing that really, sort of for the first time as the president , you are not only trying to feel more comfortable with the culture, but you are doing it as their commander. I think he was trying very hard to balance the fact that he had responsibilities as the commander, his loyalty and leadership, military having a demeanor that has been developed over years we have uniforms that overtly describe where we have been, what we have done, what our rank is and what not. In some ways we benefit from the fact that it looks impressive. You enter a room and in some ways get more respect than you as an individual have earned. We use that persona. We feel comfortable in it. But at the same time it creates a divide between us and other people, and we pay a price for that, and we are partly to blame for the fact that we benefit on the one hand but dont pay as much respect to the negative sides of that as we could. Navy seals. I am going to talk about that later in the hour as well. Tell me how you see the navy seals, what they represent, and what kind of person comes out of that training. Sure, and im going to expand it to the special operations units i have worked with. Theyre pretty unique. The first is, they have decided to volunteer for a more difficult but a more elite type of service, and they think in many cases it is because what they are really looking for is to belong to something that challenges them as individuals but allows them to sit at a table with people they admire and be considered an equal. That is a very addictive feeling if you are suddenly around people that otherwise would be your heroes and they look at you as somebody they respect. It is a draw to be in that. Cs lewis wrote a wonderful article about the inner ring. It is a little bit of a desire to be in the innermost ring. Theyre willing to pay a price in terms of how hard it is, how much time away and whatnot because being part of that very, very elite organization fulfills in them some needs. They are headstrong, often. You cannot lead them the same way you lead conventional troops. You have to engage them. The best way i have found to engage special operators is not to tell them what to do but to describe the problem. Say ive got this problem. Do you think it can be solved . They say, we think we could. How would you do that . They describe it. Would you be willing to do that . Even though it might be a very dangerous mission. And they make the call. What are you training . Is a toughness of mind . Its problemsolving, and it is problem solving not just from a logical sense, but from an emotional sense. I had a boss, back in mogadishu, wonderful guy, we sat in an after action review one time. The communications in an aircraft had not worked. He said listen, whatever equipment you have to buy, i will buy for you. Whatever experts you have to come in and train, do. Whatever other exercises you need to do, i will schedule, no excuses, no constraints, no excuses. Suddenly you take away from people the idea that they have a ready reason why they cant be great. You take away the but. Exactly. I ask these questions, too, because of what you are doing now. You have something called a mcchrystal group. You are writing another book that will capture the essence of some of these ideas. Tell me what this is about. They are all related. I am fascinated by leadership in the current environment. What i would tell you is, my experience in iraq and reinforced in afghanistan is for many, many years, really since taylor came up with scientific management, we have worshiped at the altar of efficiency. We break everything down to an individual task and if we do those tasks we are very efficient. And if we are very efficient, we are very effective. What i think happened is, you can only get the most efficient solution you can solve for y for how much x you need only if you really know what y is. We are in a world now where things are changing so fast. We cant build a perfect process because we dont know what the output has to be. The new holy grail in my view is adaptability, building an organization that is organically, automatically designed to be adaptable. It is by necessity designed to look at moving targets and develop new solutions constantly to do that. In that vein, two former seals who work for me and a young yale student who was a very bright guy, we are cowriting a book about this system. It is going to show the history of it, but it is also going to show not just military examples, but business examples and government examples we have been researching, and some that our firm, the mcchrystal group, has been partnering with companies to do. We dont do what a lot of people expect ex military to do. We are partnered with a very different part of the environment and enjoying it. I think you are also part of the franklin project, which is what . The franklin project has me very excited. I believe citizenship in america has eroded. I think people tend to think of citizenship as my rights, my entitlements. I think citizenship is more than voting and paying taxes. It is a commitment to the nation and the commitment to other americans. In that regard, i think much comes when you have to commit to something, when you have to sacrifice, when you have to contribute. The franklin project is designed to create the opportunity for every Young American between 1828 to do a year of fully funded service, conservation, health care, education, because military only needs a certain number, but to give every american that kind of experience for a year, serving with people from brooklyn, san diego, you name it, in areas that allow them to work together, force them to work together, but also, in that year, they will have sacrificed. They will have contributed. They will have helped build something. I think that will ultimately change how they view themselves as citizens. We are well into our effort. We have a big summit planned in june in gettysburg. Im very excited about that. Its great to have you here. General mcchrystals book is called my share of the task. It is now in paperback. Back in a moment. We are in contact with tribal leaders from Anbar Province who are showing great courage and resistance. This is a fight for the iraqis. That is what the president and the world decided some time ago when we left iraq. The second battle of falluja in 2004 was the biggest battle involving american troops since the korean war. Close to 100 troops were killed and 1000 wounded, but the mission was successful. Falluja was cleared of al qaeda. This month, most of it has fallen back into their hands. That has come as a disappointment to many veterans. Adam served as sergeant and squad leader. He was 21 at the time. Ryan sparks was a platoon commander. He retired recently after four deployment in iraq and afghanistan. I am pleased and honored to have my guests at this table. Welcome, all of you. I want to share with this audience a sense of take me to 2004 and why this battle was significant. I will read to you what was written at the time in the new york times. The proximity gave the fighting a hellish intensity which brought soldiers close enough to look their enemies in the eye. For a correspondent who has covered a half dozen conflicts including the war in iraq in march 2003, the fighting team at the front lines in falluja was a qualitatively different experience, a leap into a different kind of battle. Tell me about it. Fallujah at the time was the most violent part of the rack. The city was held by al qaeda and Al Qaeda Affiliated forces. We were in the third battalion first marines. We were operating outside the city for the first five months. It was rough. Constant ieds. Kidnappings in the surrounding areas. Mortar attacks, rocket attacks, ambushes. We knew at some point we would have to go into the city to clear it out. It was off limits. U. S. Forces, Coalition Forces could not enter the city. It was so bad that we were subject to indirect fire attacks on a regular basis. Our regiment was hit by a 100 22 a 122 millimeter rocket that killed our communication officer and severely wounded my predecessor. The enemy had free will on the roads of ied attacks and small arm attacks. We could not enter the city. As i was doing my first battle tour of the area, it was sir, you have to run because if you walk we are going to be under fire. This was a thorn in all of her in all of iraq. The enemy was using the stronghold to launch attacks either west into ramadi or east into baghdad, so it had to be addressed. Fallujah was close enough to affect baghdad on a daily basis. To put it in perspective, it was about the size of jacksonville, florida. The same modern infrastructure. This was not a small town. This is a large place where an organized insurgency and the forces of al qaeda could operate at the time. They could attack the surrounding area and then go back, plan, have communications and all the resources they needed, and it was easy to defend. As went falluja, so went the rest of iraq. Similarly, my regimen was operating outside falluja prior to the battle. After the first battle of falluja in april, 2004. We encountered a lot of the problems, the ied attacks, the indirect fire that we knew was stemming from the base in falluja. We knew that ever since the first battle of falluja, it was festering. We knew sooner or later we were going to have to go in there and clean it out, and that every day we waited there would be more fighters in the city, more heavily fortified with better weapons and better plans. It was our preference to go in a soon as possible. Help me understand the timeline when you have that awful killing of the four private contractors. Marchapril of 2004. And the battle took place november. Remember, the coalition wanted the iraqis to try to address the problem, but the iraqi forces inside the city were all being coerced by enemy fighters that were within the city. We would later find when we captured enemy strongholds that they had personal records of the police, the national guard, and the enemy was brutal enough to take it out on their family, whether it be their parents or their children, to make the police and the military do what they wanted them to do. But the iraqis that came to fight with us later on came from baghdad. There was more of a national spirit. I think one thing it is very important to remember is that inside the city, as the city was cleared, we found over 560 cachets of ammunition and arms inside the city. It was not like one or two ak47s. It was hundreds of pieces of artillery rounds, surface to air missiles, weapons that could have been used on any battlefield. It was a very dangerous place. And when it was over, what were your thoughts . Did you assume this was as fierce of fighting as you would see, but you have one and we of done something important in terms of this larger war . It was certainly the fiercest fighting we had seen up until that point and i certainly did not think it could get worse. I thought it was as bad as as it could get. And was it . I have not seen anything worse to this point. We thought it was going to improve the city. We have eliminated so many fighters and we had eliminated a safe haven. And also lost your own. Certainly, but i think the casualties were so overwhelmingly in our favor, like i said, we thought it was going to have a Significant Impact on improving iraq. Fallujah immediately became peaceful. There wasnt really anything left in the city after the battle. You also had a lot of stories in the news, and we came home in january. You had the iraqi elections, the arab spring, the first arab spring. There is even a great jon stewart quote where he asks in the winter of 2005 if bush was right as the elections had taken place in iraq and because of some of the changes taking place in the middle east. There was a time after the battle of falluja where it looked like we had really achieved something bigger than just clearing out the city. Once the city was taken, we did not lose another marina until the regimen rotated back. I cannot tell you what happened to the regiment that took our position. When i was brought back to talk about the battle, i could hear explosions going off in the distance. I joked that the commanders needed to come to falluja because now it was a safe area. We made a Large Gated Community out of falluja. Then we spread out into the countryside. We had local leaders asking us to do the same thing. Clean out our area of the country. We attacked the enemy and continued to hunt them down into surrounding community so they would not have a chance to come back. The point is, falluja had meaning and sacrifice and meaning. Absolutely. I think one thing we often forget is how did falluja become bad in the first place. That is often part of the story that is missing. It did not start with the Blackwater Contractors that were killed. It started in 2003 when the 86th airborne there was a group of iraqis protesting outside of a school. Shots were fired or shots werent fired. It was a he saidshe said situation, but a number of iraqis were wounded and killed, iraqi civilians killed in the summer of 2003, and that was really one falluja started to become bad. And then things got progressively worse through the remainder of 20032004. To call it a victory i would not necessarily call it a victory. I would say that the operation itself was a success, but perhaps if we had operated differently from the get go, there never would have been a need for that operation. Has that story been told . At the time cnn covered it. But it is not a part of the narrative of falluja that you often hear. Fallujah, if you look at the history of iraq, has a history of human trafficking, arms trafficking, drugs, prostitution. We would find out later that Saddam Hussein during his time would go through on a regular basis and clear the city of criminal activity, and the military would actually occupy the city for times, and then they would pull the military forces out. We ran into the hotbed of criminal and enemy activity. It was an easy Transit Route for islamic extremists coming from the west. There were also criminal gangs that operated freely inside falluja because there was no legitimate Law Enforcement from the ministry of the interior and the military presence was completely lost inside falluja. I dont want to add more to this than you do, for sure, but bringing me to todays time and what you saw has happened and what is going on in iraq we talk about this a lot. We get a chance to see each other a lot. This is a place we invested a lot. We lost friends. We fought, and you want to see a workout for the best. For me personally, when i think about the friends and comrades who gave their life in the city of falluja, i try not to think that they gave their life or anything we were doing in iraq, that they gave their life for the man on the left and the man on the right, and that has meaning for what we do each day and for the rest of our lives. I try not to get tied to anything political in nature or to the future of a country we really have no control over. I agree. These 18, 20yearold kids, when they join the marine corps, their patriotism is communitybased. They think about their high school friends, their favorite taco shop. It is not a national, macro sense, the way it is talked about. When they get into the marine corps, it is the sense of community that they cherish. When you talk about falluja, success for them is returning with honor and maintaining the respect of the man on the left and the man on the right. Everyone i fought with in falluja did just that. From a tactical sense, the battle had to be fought in november of 2004. Five days after, president bush was reelected. This was just a few years after 9 11. It allowed a little bit of momentum to happen there. It is what eventually led to the awakening. That asersonally, i see success, the locals taking back over power and everything that has happened since then, whether we have an agreement with training the iraqi army or not, those are hindsight is blind. Who knows if that would have made a difference . We got to a point where the iraqis took over for themselves and what are your witnessing is democracy at work. We are still working on it here after 236 years. And this was not a country that did not ask for democracy. There was not a revolution that started it. I think what we are seeing here is the iraqi version of democracy that all of us are going to kind of become comfortable with, and it is similar to stories around the middle east. You encouraged me to ask the question, is it worth that . There has been a lot of press recently about whether or not people should ask that question and whether or not people who have not served can ask the question. My personal feeling is that citizens of this country have an obligation to asked that question, because otherwise, what are we doing in these places if we do not have a citizenship asking the hard questions. When you read that it has been recaptured and there is a new flag over the city of falluja, does that change the answer to the question was it worth it . It is a great question and i think it depends on how you measure was it worth it. When i was a kid, a friend of mine who was like an older brother died in a car accident. He was five years older. I remember going to his funeral and the rabbi told all of the young people, he said, you all now have an obligation to live your life for john. Whenever we lost someone in iraq, i would say that to my guys. We have an obligation to live our lives for the guys that werent able to make it. They gave their lives so that we could live full lives, so that we could have families and have productive lives. Was it worth it . I dont know yet. I think that depends on what we do with our lives. I think the question is is there a changing mindset from what we saw in iraq . When we first went in, about 7000 iraqis joined us. When those soldiers who were with us every day would see locals come up to u. S. Soldiers first because they trusted us, that would start things changing. They saw how we protected and serve the people and we were starting to see small changes in the iraqi military. Rather than taking out rattan sticks in the crowd are firing into the sky, now they were going back and pushing in slowly. After we cleared out all of that criminal activity, a lot changed. The subsequent fall does not change whether or not it was worth it because the 18 or 19yearold marine who went into fight did not go into make iraq a better place. He wasnt that concerned at the high level, like ryan said. He went into the military to fight for his friends, his loved ones and his family. Once he got there, he fought for the brothers beside him. That is who he fought for. That is who he sacrificed for. As long as he did that, it was worth it. We do have an obligation to fight on for them. I feel like their sacrifice is worth it no matter what he cause i am here. Because we are all here and because those men made it so that we are here. There is a great scene at the end of saving private ryan where ryan is now an 80yearold man and he is at the gravesite of one of the guys who gave his life so that he could return to his family and he asks them, did i live a good life . He did not ask them is europe a better place. He asks did i give a good life. The answer to that question determines whether or not the sacrifice was worth it. I turn the question back around. When you ask whether it was worth it or not, i said this a couple of days ago. We the people are the ones who need to answer this question. Since world war ii, looking at korea and vietnam, definitely iraq and afghanistan, there were elections held. The president was the one who made these decisions. We the citizens of the republic gave them the power. We all need to look at ourselves and say when we enter these conflicts, is it worth it before we go in. Going forward from here, we have to maintain that in our head. I recently compared this to caisson, and it is very similar. A lot of american blood was spilled to take this piece of ground. Every military action has a timestamp on it. These things go when they come. And like we said, we fight for each other, but us as a nation when you look at the repercussions of this war, as we go forward, we really need to concentrate before we commit our troops again. Is it worth it . That is for every Single Person to decide ahead of time instead of thinking about it and living with regret later. I think much more important is what happens to us as a country. Do we have a citizenry the becomes more involved because of the lessons of iraq and afghanistan. Thank you for your service and thank you for being at this table. Thank you for having this conversation. We will see you next time. Live from pier 3, welcome to bloomberg west. I am cory johnson in for emily chang. We have more on the largest internet outage ever. One of the topics we will cover. The chinese internet outage has cut off access for hundreds of millions of people. Was this the work of superhackers, or chinas own censorship machine