...Discarding everything you've said, the truth is that if we'd stayed focused on Afghanistan, we might actually have achieved a victory. And wouldn't that be a refreshing change from Bush's random flailing?

And how would you define a victory in Afghanistan? Just kidding.

This idea is basically a hallucination. Afghanistan is larger than Iraq, even more tribal in its culture, has a larger population, and a much more difficult terrain. Add to that the direct border connection with Pakistan, the main source of the Pashtun/al Qaeda/Taliban forces. You can ask any military person how the large-scale logistics of Afghanistan compares to Iraq. Hint: there's no friendly Kuwait right on the border to roll columns in from. Did you know that 75 percent of our military supplies and 40 percent of the fuel for the war in Afghanistan is routed through Pakistan by air or ground(!) from the port of Karachi? The overland routes run right through the Taliban regions.

Look up sometime why we didn't have a lot of troops on the ground there during the first stages of the Afghanistan invasion.

No rational person can make a hard case for how Afghanistan would somehow have been "won" any faster than Iraq with the same resources as were committed to Iraq, or with fewer U.S. or civilian casualties.

Hell, we might even have caught Osama bin Laden, and we wouldn't today be trying to deal with Pakistan's intransigence and covert support of our enemies.

How does that follow? Are you implying that we would have followed bin Laden into Pakistan? Or that somehow without bin Laden, the entire western Pakistan al Qaeda nexus would have just evaporated into the breeze? This area of Pakistan is where much of the Taliban and other radical Islamists come from. It didn't move there from Afghanistan--it was the other way around.

We wouldn't be fretting now about Iran's influence, after having knocked off the primary balance to Iran's influence in the region. We wouldn't be worrying about the state of our military after five years of hard misuse.

"Balance?" The wars of that "balance" killed anywhere from 1.5 to 2 million people in both countries over the years. That "balance" didn't keep Iraq from invading Kuwait either.

Refresh yourself on the date Iran supposedly gave up its nuclear weapons program. Coincidence?

The almost certain end result of the Saddam status quo would have been Iran and Iraq racing each other for the bomb over the following years, never mind other weapons programs. Not sure it would have made much difference who eventually won the race.

As for the state of the military, you think our military would have had a cakewalk in Afghanistan, somehow needing fewer troops for shorter tours? Right.

I can see why everyone wants to avoid speculation on alternatives. Most of yours seem to be located somewhere up the slopes of the Big Rock Candy Mountain.