The insurgency is home grown

Thats a fact. That is not even questioned in the approach our military has taken. Even Rumsfeld has retired the line 'foreign Jihadists'. The people detonating IEDs, sniping at our soldiers, and killing other Iraqis are, unfortunately, Iraqis.

"You can, of course, subscribe to the odd theory that all of these jihadists were incensed ONLY by our attack on "secular" Iraq, and would have simply slept through our occupation of al Qaeda base Afghanistan."

No, what I 'subscribe' to is the notion that several thousand if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are now under the sway of a tide of radicalization and anti-US hatred that they did not have, or at least did not have to the level they have now.

"If the only U.S. military presence in the Middle East was 150,000 troops in Afghanistan, I submit that our casualty rate there by now would be much higher than the current 280 or so, and that the costs involved would be significantly higher than what is currently allocated to only that part of the war."

You, of course, have the prerogative to author any work of speculative fiction that you like. However, I'll point this out again: You have been entirely wrong on every aspect of the Iraq war and its outcome. While this does not give you, hilariously, any pause- it makes it hard enough to take you non-science-fiction posts seriously, and completely blows away my ability to 'suspend disbelief' when you 'speculate' what 'might have been'.

"According to one al Qaeda statement, we have apparently killed about 4,000 foreign fighters in Iraq. This implies that we are, in fact, using Iraq as a "sponge."

This is really quite mind boggling. You are relying upon Al Qaeda statements to justify our continued presence in Iraq?

In the radicalization of the Iraqis, we have created a situation where for every 1 foreign jihadist we kill in Iraq, there are several dozen new ones clammoring to get on board with Al-Qaeda.

I have no doubt that we have killed some foreign Jihadists. But lets take your 'from the butt of al-qaeda' number of 4,000. We have lost some 3,000 troops in Iraq, have seen 30,000+ wounded, many of them gravely, we have spent a large fraction of one trillion dollars, we have destroyed our alliances in the prosecution of this war, we have created a failed state ripe for terrorist foment, we have handed Iran its 'dream'....

Sounds like we need to re-think our strategy.

Beyond that, and more to the point, your notion that these mythical 4000 jihadists wouldn't have had an opportunity to strike at the US if we hadn't put ourselves in Iraq.

DL