Cliff:

You posted: “Derb, I’m puzzled by the notion asserted by you and others that the war in Iraq has nothing to do with the so-called War on Terror. We just eliminated Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He was the commander of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Surely, al-Qaeda is an important enemy in the War on Terror.”

Indeed, and good riddance to AMaZ. But this is a bit like those apologists for the manned space program pointing to the spin-off effects: “If not for the Apollo program, we wouldn’t have teflon!”

If you want teflon, do some lab research on non-stick materials. You don’t need to spend a gazillion dollars lofting huge man-carrying spaceships into orbit.

Similarly, if you (I mean, the president) had put me at the head of US counter-terrorist operations in, say February 2003 and said: “There’s this guy Zarqawi, and he needs killing. Get on it,” I bet I could have got the job done for, oh, around 0.001 percent of the cost of the Iraq war. (My first thought would just have been to contract the job out on a fixed-fee basis to Mossad, who seem pretty good at this sort of thing… but I might have come up with something else.)

If you want to kill terrorists, figure out a way to do it. If you want to go launching trillion-dollar nation-building projects, and your electorate is cool with it, go do that. The connection between the two things remains unproven, though.

There are terrorists all over, Cliff: Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Hamburg, Manchester, Chicago, Bali. You know that better than anyone. I’m in favor of killing them all, by any methods we can devise, and as long as it takes. Totally in favor. No doubt. I just don’t see why a Forever War in Iraq helps. In fact, I believe it’s an unnecessary distraction.