Dear Mr Obama

Just read that the most popular election-related video on Youtube was a message by an Iraq vet saying that by calling the Iraq war a mistake, Obama is insulting everyone who has fought and died in it. "Obama does not understand freedom." Hmm... I think the soldier was well-intentioned, and he has a point -- people who died fighting in the war risked their lives nobly. However, there is a huge point the soldier is overlooking: people don't like having freedom imposed on them. Even when some part of the population wants freedom, you can't make it last by a foreign intervention. And freedom isn't the thing that people in many places desire most. We in the US have all these other things -- safety, food, water, electricity, toilets, jobs, money -- that we take for granted. People in Iraq and many other hotspots around the world don't have most of these things, and they want them really bad. Freedom is rated somewhere after all of these things.