The War Party has gone from the spurious line of reasoning, "We have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here," to not really fighting them "over there" but just leaving our troops as sort of reverse hostages to draw fire so that we have a pretense to get drawn into any regional conflict. The continuing U.S. presence across the Middle East is nothing but a depraved exercise in putting American personnel in harm’s way for its own sake.