Well, Tom, I read your original post, and picked up on the low-key pugnacious tone of it. Sometimes I'm up for a pissing contest, sometimes I'm not. This time around I wasn't inclined to bother.

Part of the problem is that you keep saying that nobody's offered an alternative, yet I have, a number of times. You seem more interested in perpetuating the idea that nobody can offer an alternative than to actually acknowledge the alternatives that are offerred.

Ah well, once more into the breach...one last time...

Framing the question in terms of a parallel universe is neat, because it's possible to identify the branching point: Early 2002.

The first response to 9/11 was absolutely automatic, and whoever was President would have had to do exactly the same thing. Al Qaeda did it, Al Qaeda was in Afghanistan, we invade Afghanistan. All any President was called upon to do was say, "yeah, go get 'em, boys!"--any other response would border on treason. That's why I have a hard time seeing the conservative exaltation of Bush's post-9/11 "leadership" as anything other than partisan puffery.

Bush started to lose his way when the war in Afghanistan started to wind down (but never ended), and he started thinking about how to capitalize on 9/11 to advance the neocon agenda of global hegemony. Iraq only makes sense in that context, not the war on terror.

(BTW, Greg's post above on "The Post-Modern President" is an interesting read, relevant because it describes how Bush tries to shoehorn his preexisting agenda as the solution to any problem. The neocon agenda existed prior to 9/11, and now he's pushing it as the all-purpose answer to terrorism. I think that tendency is the root of why so many of his actions seem tangential to the actual problems before us.)

The better alternative would have been to stay focused on Al Qaeda, which means Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan. It's outrageous that there's an estimated 1,000 Al Qaeda and several tens of thousands of Taliban moving freely about that region today. We had an international consensus that invading Afghanistan was the right thing to do, and we could have built on that to finish the job there, and for future initiatives--focused on terror--instead of pissing it away on the Iraq sideshow.

Follow the terrorists and follow their money. That leads to Saudi Arabia, and there's plenty of evidence that that would be a conflict of interest for Bush. Another President would have had no inhibitions about pointing the finger at the source and putting the squeeze on the Saudis. In the broader Middle East context, Saudi Arabia is no more popular than Iraq; going after them, up to and including the use of force, would have had the same negatives, but with the positive of being actually related to terrorism and 9/11. Further, Bush talks about how transforming Iraq into a Western democracy would set a good example, but his logic is flawed. Iraq, as a secular dictatorship, has less in common with other Middle Eastern countries than does S.A. Transform Saudi Arabia and you demonstrate a direct path from Arabic feudalism to modern democracy.

A strength of the parallel universe metaphor is that it acknowledges that the predictions or plan of action gets fuzzier as time goes on and subsequent events start to dictate the course of action. I don't have a specific prescription for where to go after Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. How those two initiatives work out, how other parties (terrorists, other Mideast countries, the UN and associated "great powers") react, determines where to go from there. But the key mistake I see was Iraq, and the superior alternative would be finishing Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and dealing with Saudi Arabia.

That's about the fourth time I've laid out pretty much the same thoughts. Next time you insist that nobody has an alternative to Bush's bungling, I won't bother to go through this exercize.