One disagreement with his statement:

The "created thousands of new terrorists" concept has never has a solid underpinning. In other words, nobody has ever explained to me why invading Iraq, supposedly a secular enemy of the Islamists, somehow would raise the ire of al Qaeda and the radical Islamists more than invading Afghanistan, home of the Islamist Taliban and a home base of al Qaeda at the time.

We are talking about the Islamist terrorists, now, not the native insurgents in Iraq, who not only were not "created" by our invasion, but used to run the whole damn country.

We are facing al Qaeda in Iraq because that's where most of our military and presence is and therefore, according to the al Qaeda leadership, that is now where the battlefield is.

You cannot point to one major terrorist who would not be after us in Afghanistan if we had never come within miles of Iraq, or one major terrorist who would be farming goats right now if we had 200,000 troops in Afghanistan instead, trying to build democracy in that nation and keeping the Islamists at bay.

Try and locate a single major Islamist terrorist who, prior to March of 2003, or, for that matter, September of 2001, wasn't one already. Go ahead. Go down the list. Bin Laden. Zarqawi. Zawahiri. Al-Masri. Mullah Omar. Not the cannon fodder, like the drugged saps who drive the car bombs, but those running the show.

The influx of Islamist terrorists opposing American forces would have been exactly the same if we had invaded Syria, Iran, Morocco, or Yemen. This is not as comforting as the belief that we wouldn't be having problems without Iraq, yet another facet of the "No Bush = No Problem" meme, but it's true.

If, like Bowser, one believed we should not have invaded Afghanistan either, there would be at least someplace logical to stand on this issue.