I hear ten thousand ways Bush is doing it wrong. Yet not one of you is willing to stand up and say, with any level of realism, how it would have been done right.

The standard wisdom here has been that without Iraq, we would have had a hundred thousand troops to work with in Afghanistan.

Any discussion of what they would have done, exactly, what level of nation-building would have been required, what the jihadist response around the world would have been, or for that matter, what these troops would have done about the heroin trade, gets shut down almost immediately. Not surprising, since anyone with perception would see where the conversation would lead. So we'll shut it down yet again.