1,200 americans died during that time, thousands of others wounded. and by the way, if you take a look at the scene, much of the sunni leadership in iraq had been run out of the country. by maliki. and the experiment looks fragile. so what did you get? and many people think it wasn't the deployment of the u.s. forces, it was the essentially hiring or bribing, if you will, of young sunnis that helped stabilize that. so there's a legitimate conversation that could be had. and john mccain didn't want a conversation. he wanted to enforce an orthodoxy about his role and that war and that surge because that's the dividing line for him about who's a real patriot and who's not. and that fundamentally was what much of the hearing was about today. are you genuinely a patriot and see the world like we in the kind of national security hawk wing of the gop do, or do -- but i think hagel, you know, while he's not going to be given credits for the most eloquent glad-handing senator or defense secretary, he seemed like a thought. sergeant who had been on the front line, who gave i think a very compelling set of reasons why this surge didn't deserve a binary yes-no response. >> steve, big picture, you're