That's rather cynical, Tom. Since you're not an "FDR fan", does that mean that you think that World War II wasn't a justified, defensive war? Odd, if so. It wasn't just that we were attacked at Pearl Harbor, it was that Germany was out of the box and attacking our allies in Europe. That makes for a rather weak analogy with Afghanistan, although there's some merit to the comparison; and none at all with Iraq, which was completely kept in the box and hadn't attacked anybody in more than a decade.

Your assertion that the definition of a defensive war includes obliterating the attacker is not only nonsense, it's irrelevant to the question of asymmetric warfare. In fact, there's a good case to be made that if we're doing any significant obliterating in an asymmetric war, we're aiming at the wrong targets. Guerilla fighters don't have much in the way of fixed infrastructure for us to obliterate, and doing so is just wasted effort. You measure success in asymmetric warfare (from the 900 pound gorilla's perspective) by the ratio of individual fighters killed to the collateral damage to innocents and property. Bush's approach is resulting in a very small number of fighters killed and an unconscionable number of innocents killed and civil infrastructure destroyed. His score is down in the noise, he's doing such a piss-poor job of it.

The cliche whining about the UN is rather nauseating when you consider how RightWing hatred of the UN has led to a lack of support by the US which makes Winger bitching a self-fulfilling prophecy. We can take much of the blame for the ineffectuality of the UN. Instead of just sitting around bad-mouthing the UN, how about showing some integrity and trying to make it work? For god's sake, the UN is our creation and once a source of immense pride as a symbol of international order. It's reprehensible to turn our backs on it now and undermine it at every turn. But hey, reprehensible betrayal is what Wingers do, I guess I shouldn't be surprised.