>"we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”

I'm stealing this. These army guys are a bunch of regular Mark Twains.

And to return to regularly scheduled programming, remember the next time somebody says that a big, pricey universal public program isn't possible that we spent trillions of dollars - without asking how we were going to pay for it - on the idea that we could turn two separate countries into liberal democracies by blowing shit up.