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What you say makes sense for Afghanistan. I was always of the let’s bomb em and leave party. Should they let Al Queda back in and build more camps, no biggie; bomb them again. But it doesn’t apply to Iraq. Bombing their gubmint out of business would serve no purpose. They had nothing to do with 9/11, didn’t harbor Al Queda, and actually could have been better used as a Strong Man to stand against more fanatical, less anti-Western blocs like the Iran Gang.

Unless you really, really bought into the WMD thing. But that was only ever half the casus bellies at most. The other half we couldn’t address directly, because Bush the Younger had run against Clintonian nation building. I’m convinced erecting a US backed and to a large extent controlled “democracy” in the heart of the Middle East was the main goal. Because since WWII that’s the only way the Powers That Be can imagine keeping the peace, aside from world gubmint.

Bombing and running would not have a nation built. And without nation building the entire effort was futile. Unless, again, you bought the WMD rationale. Tge trick, by the way, was not yo outright lie about them. I’m not saying there were no WMDs. We know there were at some point, since Saddam used them. The lie was that they posed an imminent threat. Apart from the specious and question begging argument for war from Iraq breaking the 91 truce (why enforce it now, instead of any if the number of alleged breaches between the two Iraq wars?), there was no oldfashioned Just War reason for Iraq, Part II. So they had the WMD thing, because nation building for its own sake never seems enough of a justification for ground war, though for some reason we can go to war in the air when fancy takes us.

Well, the WMD threat wasn't so much from Iraq itself but in the possibility of cross pollination with the al Qaeda types who would be the delivery system for the Iraqi WMDs. And if you read Douglas Feith's book War and Decision it becomes clear that the real underlying motivation was to take the war to al Qaeda somewhere "over there" so that the front line against them was in the ME rather than in the United States. The administration was worried that more terror strikes within the US would necessitate internal security measures that would heavily infringe civil liberties and fundamentally transform our society in a bad way. Which is ironic since the left went bananas smearing Bush with the narrative that he wanted to scare the public into accepting a police state. Obviously we got the Patriot Act but in hindsight it has been pretty mild and probably pretty effective, and it would have been a lot worse had there been more attacks. Judged by the criterion of whether the Iraq invasion tied up al Qaeda's energies in a place that was safely away from the American homeland, you'd have to say it worked. But of course there are other criteria to judge it by.

Bombing their gubmint out of business would serve no purpose. They had nothing to do with 9/11, ...

But Hussein supported terrorists. That was my red line. I would not have stopped with Afghanistan and Iraq, every where in the world where Muslim terrorist existed with the support of their governments would have been sent to the stone age. Our lack of action in Libya after 9/11 is a prime example of the wrong policy. Ghadaffi played nice, but to this day there are Muslim terrorists in Libya. Iran is still a problem that goes back the that jackwaggon, Carter. I wouldn't have stopped at Lybia and Iran. There are many other Islamic Republics that back terrorists that should have been sent back to the 8th century.

It takes a fundamental understanding Islam to rid the world of terrorists that threaten our interests. However, that fundamental understanding is simple to understand. We never focused on the core problem and how to deal with it without killing a billion Muslims. The word "Islam" means to "submit". That's how you beat these bastards, you make them submit to our will, not their death cult.

Rebuilding is absolutely the wrong strategy. Their terrorist actions are rewarded through rebuilding. In their minds, their religion works because they get to drain our resources and in the process they are enriched.