"There are and will be ample opportunities to fight them where we are invited and welcome."

Where? Somalia? Any other examples of where we are invited and welcome?

"My point is that when the battle moves to this country things will get ugly fast. Most of the civil liberties that we value will be history and odds of foreign intervention using nasty tactics will escalate. The results of regularly occurring 911 type attacks will result in the unleashing of hell."

This oft-referenced idea that somehow if we are engaged in a military action in another country, we will be safer at home strikes me as unjustified and a bit simplistic.

Before 2003, Iraq was a country that had only small currents of Islamic Fundamentalism and little or no connections with anti-us international terrorist groups. Now, it is a revolution-torm country awash in sectarian violence. In Iraq, we have now large numbers of people ripe for recruitment by anti-american and anti-secular terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda and a government that is heavily influenced by pro-iranian shi'a fundamentalists. (Sadr and company). Even the Kurds are falling under the sway of Iran!

Meanwhile, it is just as easy to stroll accross our southern border or to place a bomb or WMD on a container bound to the US. Meanwhile, a large portion of the vital oil reserves of Iraq fall more and more under the sway of an Iranian-friendly government. Meanwhile, our political performace has driven countless allies away from supporting us or our objectives.

Sorry, this reasoning that 'if we don't fight them there, we'll fight them here' just seems to hold as much water as the largest Iraqi Sand Dune. Do the math- a bunch more disenfranchised disaffected muslims with a big grudge against the US, and no real increase in border security, and Al Qaeda doing quite well and executing numerous large-scale operations all over the globe.

Going into Afghanistan may have been the right thing to do- there we were actually fighting 'in the house' of Al-Qaeda and blowing up and breaking Jihadis and terrorist organizations, and a nation-state that was supporting them.

But we stepped away from that fight and deployed the bulk of our might to Iraq- which is turning into another post 1980's Afghanistan: A war-torn ideologically driven endless civil war well funded by governments and organizations with broad agendas.

In essence, what we did is create another Afghanistan-like situation while quite possibly dooming our efforts in Afghanistan proper.

Fighting 'any old' war in the mid-east is not the solution. Fighting the right-war in the region, at the right time and with the right means and against the right people/powers might be part of the solution.

At its heart, all the great ideological struggles of the last several hundred years have NOT been struggles with militarily founded answers- with the possible exception of WWII, and only because the political powers in europe fumbled the ball horribly before and during the rise of the Nazis.

Rather, the great struggles of the last several hundred years have been ideological and political struggles within which miltary might has been just one facet. GWB has tried to impose a military answer in Iraq to a problem that is largely irrelevant to the ideological struggle at hand- and that in itself has only compounded the actual problems that our country faces vis-a-vis global terrorism and islamic fundamentalism.

DL