“First off, as every scriptwriter should know (I’m sure Sorkin does, he just trusts in the assumption that the average viewer doesn’t), the vast majority of leftover Stingers were collected by the U.S. after the Afghan war. Not that this matters. These units have a “shelf life” of only a few years — which means there’s no way the missiles Al Qeada may be using against us in Iraq could be leftover Stingers from the struggle against Soviet occupation. Most sources peg the SAMs that are giving our aircraft a hard time over Baghdad as Iranian-made units…”

Uh, how do you “know” that the vast majority (and what would consitute the “vast majority” of them, as you don’t know how many launchers were over there by 1989, or how many missiles there were left? Because somebody “on background” claimed that was the case? This is the same CIA that missed the impending 2001 attack, for one. Not that they were the only ones…

Also, the British Army supplied Blowpipes (a version of our old REDEYE), and we also supplied Chinese MANPADS as well. Do you know how many of them, and their missiles, were left after the CIA, Special Forces, and SAS left? No? Well, well. And, there have been some claims, but no particular hard evidence offered, for the “Iranian” SAMs, of the few that have actually been fired at our aricraft…maybe, but a lot of things have been blamed on the Iranians, because it suited the USG’s agenda at the time…as for a short-shelf life, the STINGERS have a much better shelf-life than their competition, of course, depending on the conditions. It’s primarily a question of keeping up the batteries’ life. The systems themselves can last a lot longer than you surmise…

As for using the argument that we should “stay the course” in Iraq, because we didn’t in Afghanistan, is the proverbial comparison of an apple to an orange, or maybe a rutabaga, in this case. There’s no matchup here to make a useful comparison, except that in Iraq, we did it your way — six years now — and we have been fought to a standstill by an insurgency armed with 1960′s-era Russian weapons and vehicle bombs.