WASHINGTON -- In December 2003, U.S. Rep. Jo Bonner had just wound up his first trip to Iraq when news broke of the capture of deposed President Saddam Hussein. It was surely, Bonner said at the time, a turning point in a conflict that had already claimed some 450 American lives.
"The reality is different from the hope," Bonner, R-Mobile, said in a phone interview Monday from Amman, Jordan, where he had arrived several hours earlier from Baghdad.
While still hopeful that Americans would one day be able to look back on their foray into Iraq as "a courageous decision that made a positive difference," he also alluded to the possibility of failure in the goal of creating a stable, democratic nation.
"We may look back and say we gave it our best shot and we did everything we could do to make it a success. And at the end of the day we could not make people accept the gift of freedom." snip
Although unease over the Iraqi enterprise is growing among GOP lawmakers, there still "aren't very many" willing to voice those misgivings publicly, said Norman Ornstein, a congressional expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank........
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