This coming Wednesday marks the fifth anniversary of the start of Iraq war. In 2002, James Webb, former assistant defense secretary and secretary of the Navy under President Reagan, wrote a piece in The Washington Post asking, "Do we really want to occupy Iraq for the next 30 years?"
Webb, now the junior Democratic senator from Virginia, says the Iraq war hurt the U.S. strategically, shifting the focus on terrorism to the wrong place.
"In the post-9/11 environment, the strategic relevance of Iraq, per se, was dramatically reduced," Webb tells Scott Simon.
"Moving into this country that was not directly threatening us, decapitating a government, and then having to occupy this country has dramatically affected the strategic ability of the United States to do a lot of other things that would have been far more useful," Webb says.
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