Luis joined the army at seventeen years old and genuinely liked the military. He decided to become an officer and went through the "Green to Gold" program. Luis says that he had no reason not to believe the administration when they made the case for war. He was not someone who opposed the war from the beginning.

In September of 2003, Luis was deployed to Iraq and served as a platoon leader for cav scouts. With thirty to forty soldiers, Luis was tasked the job of securing the Iraq/Syria border, a monumental mission indeed. After requesting again and again more manpower, Luis received nothing.

In January 2007, Luis was asked by the American Enterprise Institute to be a member of an Iraq study group as an Iraqi security forces subject matter expert. Luis says that the biggest obstacle in Iraq is corruption. He wrote an op-ed in the New York Times titled "Losing Iraq One Truckload at a Time"; that is what caught the AEI's eye.

Luis is sharing with us three quotes about corruption within a government: Cuba in 1902; South Vietnam in 1972; and Iraq in 2006. They all sound eerily similar. There are now sixteen boxes displayed on the screen with arrows pointing everywhere. This is the "Problem Tree" that Luis and his father, an international economist devised to diagnose the problems in Iraq.

The quote on the screen right now is of the GAOs "Stabilizing Iraq" report of September 11, 2006. It says that the number of Iraqi security forces is unimportant, because these numbers include officers who were absent without leave. I very much understand this; there were 600 officers in our police station and 200 never showed up, but collected half their paycheck. The other half went to the general of the station, but, on paper, 600 officers sounds good, especially when they always showed up on paper.

Corruption does not end with the Iraqis, however. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been paid by US taxpayers to private contractors for projects that have never been started.

Luis is now speaking about a memo in a conference between deputy commanders that he was a part of that says that there is no way for the organizations training and mentoring the Iraqi security forces to have the Iraqis maintain any type of accountability . . . that is the story of my year in Iraq as well. The idea of serial numbers and permanent accountability was so foreign to our officers. I had always assumed that the generals didn't know this was a problem; now, I know they did know, but still failed to do anything about it.