...you have taken my question and turned it on its head. I said a good diplomat does not unite his enemies against him, which is apparently what has happened here. You have made it into a question of allying with one of our enemies against another. That is not what I was getting at, but it's a good way to distract from your lack of an answer, and a good way to deflect my strongly-implied criticism of the way in which this administration conducts policy.

Let me spell out the analogy, without the attachment of any ideological values to the principles, but only the practical diplomatic ramifications.

The United States : the Baathists and Al Qaeda :: the Third Reich : the United States and the USSR.

That is not to say the US is analogous to either the Baathists or the Nazis. That is not to say that the USSR is analogous to Al Qaeda. But that is to say that the United States is in the same position now that Nazi Germany was in then, that of having antagonized two ideological enemies (of each other) to the point that they can make common cause against the Greater Enemy.

You don't have to be that careful with me explaining your analogy. I understood it. I'm not going to twist it to make you sound like you're calling America a terrorist group, although that's standard practice with some folks. ;)

Your analysis would stand up a lot better if there had been the slightest sign of real enmity between Saddam and the Islamist terrorists in the years between Gulf War One and the current war. While lots of rhetoric got thrown around, how many Iraqis got bombed by Islamic terrorists? How many of Saddam's buildings got attacked by suicide bombers? How many Iraqi soldiers were shot by snipers, or rolled over bombs in the roads? How many planes were flown into Saddam's palaces?

And how many Islamist terror camps were attacked by Saddam's troops? How many Arab terrorists were tried by Saddam's regime and sentenced to death or imprisonment?

Russia and Germany were already tearing at each other's throats in 1941, months before America declared war on Germany. The United States was an ally of convenience for Stalin to save his own skin. Nothing more.

You can blame the current alliance between the Baathists and the Islamists on the American invasion, but there is no more hard evidence for that being true than for the proposition that they have been allied all along. And even if our enemies had not teamed up to work together, they have both had us as their number major enemy for a decade. Is that much of an improvement?