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...They need to level with the American people, and use their time and energy on convincing us that this is a desirable thing. The unions and blue-collar people would be against it, and many American patriots and sovereignists, so that is presumably why they are trying to do it secretly. However, I believe that the secretive approach will cause them more grief in the long run

I agree -- to me, it is similar to President Bush's non-explanation of Why we invaded Iraq.

I believe that we did that to try to create the world's largest aircraft carrier (Iraq) right in the middle of the Middle East. The plan, I believe, was that the "carrier" (USS IRAQ) was to base a large American military force that would pacify the entire region indefinitely.

But President Bush never said that at all - even though, in my view, it made perfect sense. Instead, he said we needed to destroy the (apparently) non-existant or at least minimal WMD program; Get rid of Sadam (who we had supported for decades); and "Bring Democracy" to the area - non of which made real sense.

It may still work...

I confess that my naive assumption was that we went into Iraq partly because it was one of the states backing the terrorists, partly because all the Democrats were agreed that Saddam was the evil enemy, and partly in order to secure the second largest middle-eastern oil supply, in case we had to deal with the Saudis, who are fundamentally responsible for the rise of the Jihadists. The Saudis would pretty certainly blow up their oil facilities if attacked, and it could take a good long time to restore the infrastructure.

I also assumed that we would DEAL with the state-sponsored sources of terror, which certainly included Syria and Iran, using Iraq as our base in the area as you suggest.

If Bush can be faulted, it is because he started out exactly in the right way, and then seems to have decided not to follow through in the logical way. He has remained in Afghanistan and Iraq, but he has failed to follow up as he should have done.

I agree with you regarding the aircraft-carrier analogy -- that it was part of the reason. However, I don't agree with your penultimate paragraph.

The democracy thing was a true reason (though ambitious), based on the idea that democratic states don't often attack other states. The WMD thing was also real (look at the 1995-2002 comments of even Pelosi and both Clintons -- everyone felt he was a real danger, mostly to Israel and our Arab 'allies').