For someone so interested in grammar and punctuation it is amazing you have so much trouble with logic. Virtually everything you post tries to prove things using faulty logic, by excluding this huge expanse of middle ground so you can battle against the other extreme.

Who is this "left" you are talking about? There are plenty of centrists, swing voters, center left, center right, and hundreds of other interest groups left entirely out of your equation. Some people are leftist in some issues and rightist in others. All this middle ground are the ones who really decide most things while the extremes hurl insults at each other.

You seem to want to shoehorn everyone into either being a Bush extreme right type or a communist/terrorst. The world has very little to do with either of them. Most of the US and probably 80% of the rest of the world's people disagree with Bush on most of his policies. Those people are nearly all outside this narrow version of the left you try and put them into. Many of them in other countries are right wing as well.

You have this stark choice that everyone has to agree with, that if you aren't with Bush you're with the terrorists. This is just part of his sophistry though and has nothing to do with the way the excluded middle in that statement thinks or needs to respond to. Just because Bush uses sophistry constantly to support his rationalisations doesn't mean everyone has to be suckered into it.

Indeed there weren't terrorists in Iraq before they were invaded. They had committed no terrorist attacks anywhere, certainly not in the US. As I said earlier the war turned many of them into all kinds of fighters, some of which fit into your narrow definition of terrorists. There are plenty of other though who would be freedom fighters, people wanting revenge, wanting jihad, wanting foreigners out, criminals, mercenaries, etc. Very few of those in the grey area would be any threat to the US and warrant any flypaper.

The implication in the fly paper canard, that Al Qaeda is being drawn in and exhausted by being in Iraq. It may be true for some people but most of these other fighters are that dreaded excluded middle again. They didn't fight the US before and they don't fit into the flypaper theory, they are all these shades of greys that make the sophist arguments look bad.

As to Saddam killing people this is yet another excluded middle argument. You are saying that if we didn't invade then Saddam would have continued to kill lots of people so it was right to invade. One problem is you don't know how many he was supposed to have been killing and whether they did anything to deserve it. Syria and Egypt regularly torture people according to Amnesty international, you didn't seem to mind it when sending Al Qaeda prisoners over there to be tortured. How many radicals does Saudi Arabia and Egypt kill and torture? How many does Kuwait and Israel kill?

Then you have to weigh up how many people were killed by the war itself and had their life damaged in other ways, and compare that to how they would have been before. Then you have to look at the millions dying in Africa of AIDS, wars, and starvation while no one cares much about their lives. It's nice to have this black/white argument that all of a sudden concern for human life was the reason for this invasion, but that obligates to to care about all the other people dying and being murdered elsewhere. Unfortunately they are also in the excluded middle to make Bush look he's saving people's lives. Spend a hundred billion on Africa if you are serious about human life.

Most of the casualties of the last ten years has been from the sanctions on Iraq, which was a bone headed f*ck up over weapons that were destroyed long ago. When you compare what Saddam did to how many the sanctions killed he comes off looking pretty good.

The first Gulf War appears to have been a screw up by Bush I's ambassador who told Saddam the US wouldn't care if he invaded. Then the first war was to fix that screw up and resulted in sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands. The 300,000 you refer to was another screw up by Bush I who encouraged people to rise up and then they got slaughtered.

The Middle East has always been a mess. Applying this kind of false excluded middle logic makes it look simpler but it just leads to more disasters. France didn't want to be involved because they had this happen to them already in Algeria. Germany has had plenty of bad experience in occupying countries as has Russia. They foresaw this was going to be a disaster and they were right. They've had their share of leaders playing this excluded middle game and leading them to disaster and they don't want any more of it.