At least one late 25 year old kid got it.

Army Staff Sgt. Jesse Williams forecast Iraq's peril seven years ago in a telephone call to his father, Herb Williams, a Santa Rosa political consultant and Army veteran.

“It's about time for us to leave,” said Jesse Williams, 25, a Bronze Star winner on his second tour. “We've done our job.”

Williams told his father that Iraqis had engaged in religious warfare for centuries before the United States was created and would continue it for centuries to come, Herb Williams recalled. Deposing Saddam Hussein was an appropriate mission, the infantryman said, but it wasn't America's job to keep peace among Iraq's contentious sects.

“Jesse was right, he was spot on,” Herb Williams said.

Jesse Williams was killed by a sniper's bullet two months later and about 1,000 people attended his memorial service at the Wells Fargo Center for Arts.

He was the seventh of 10 North Coast men to die in Iraq.

At the end of the article, a general with a West Point graduate daughter currently serving says he "hopes" the same unwinding won't happen in Afghanistan. That is whistling past the graveyard imo. That region has been unstable for at least as long as humans have walked upright. There won't be any end to it. It is the birthplace of the trifecta of doom (Christianity, Islam, Judaism).