The following is a guest article by retired Army Lt. Gen. Daniel P. Bolger, written from his modest retirement mansion in Bel Air, Calif.

It's time to clear the air and close the books on two conflicts that we've been fighting for more than a decade. It's time for the truth to be shouted from the opinion section of The New York Times and the front page of Amazon.com. You guys lost Iraq and Afghanistan, and I'm boldly hitting the prime-time news circuit to talk about it.

I know that I'm skewering a lot of sacred cows here: Even today, with ISIS in firm control of half of Iraq and much of Syria, it's hard to find anyone who doesn't think the Iraq War was an overwhelming success. Well I'm here to tell you otherwise.

It's the kind of story that I'm sure comforted William Westmoreland, after he'd retired on his pension and published his own account of Vietnam titled "A Soldier Reports."