The war on Terror

We're constantly reminded that the Bush administration views the war in Iraq as the central front in the war on terror. Often we're told that if we don't fight them over there, we'll have to fight them over here. That's assuming that fighting terrorists (and a variety of new religious and nationalist identified groups) there precludes an attack here. Most folks would say that it increases the chances of one group or another taking a stab at us since this massive, baseless, and brutal war has alienated huge swaths of the planet's population.

In fact, the irrational targeting of Iraq as a strategy to defeat terrorists might be seen as a failure in the war on terror... unless the administration is relying on the genius insight that nobody picks on the crazy kid that smells weird and lashes out randomly on the playground, throwing rocks and spitting. We've done the foreign policy equivalent of wet ourselves and collapse in a scratching biting frenzy on the ground. Let's see the terrorists figure that one out