In short, the U.S. view of the Iraq War remains insular and narcissistic. The focus is on what U.S. troops may have gotten wrong, and how the military could perform better in the future.
Imagine you’re President Joe Biden. You need $2 trillion dollars to fund one of your stated priorities – infrastructure. You learn of a war plane, the F-35 Lightning II, that would cost as much as $1.7 trillion to buy, field and maintain over the next 50 years. It’s $200 billion over budget, and more than ten years behind schedule. What do you do?