Dear Josh,

I sure do wish White House Chief of Staff Bolten would read and respond to this letter from smijer. Here is but an excerpt:

Worst of all, you claim that a policy aimed at improving our success - or at least repairing our failures - in Iraq will mean that "the sacrifices of American troops would have been in vain." Those sacrifices will never have been in vain, regardless of the outcome, those men and women having made them in good faith service to the nation that asked it of them. Continuing our current policy will not validate the sacrifices we asked of those men and women, but it will create new sacrifices. It is of greatest importance that we ask that sacrifice only where necessary and where some good may come from it, not merely as a means of validating past failures on the part of their leaders.