The point I've been trying to make for weeks...
Is that this war is bigger than Iraq, and that we would be in similar difficulties if we had had 150,000 troops in Afghanistan for all this time, and if the focus of our enemies around the Middle East had been on that battlefield instead of this one.
It's interesting that I get a lot of grief for coming up with analyses of the alternatives, but that the largest assumptions made in these arguments--that things would be just swell if we were only in Afghanstan, or that everything would be going just great if only Your Guys had been in charge of the war on Islamic radicalism--are never questioned in the same way.