[Preechr]

I'm a bit more optimistic on the perceived benefits the world will enjoy for us having engaged in this fight. While I understand that it's silly to try and hinge a discussion on what might have happened if we hadn't acted as we did, I think it's a safe assumption that 9/11 represented such a large scale upping of the ante in the already raging terrorist side of the war, which leads me to believe they had a little more than 5 years of nothing else in store for us. Can we agree that our response to 9/11, whether or not you like it, has disrupted their plans? We constantly debate among ourselves as wheter we are, in fact, safer now thanks to the WOT... Is there andy debate as the safety of our enemies?

Additionally, I didn't mean to make you think I was saying that war is no more important than a garden variety piece of legislation. What I meant was that politicians use the same processes to run a war as they do everything else. Government, as I have said many times before, is like a chipper-shredder. No matter how you intend to use it, it does everything the same way. How many times have you seen a piece of legislation come out of that machine as a "compromise," which basically means it's about half of what it was supposed to be? They will always say that's all they could get through, but that they'll be refining it and adding to it later on.

As sick as it sounds when we're talking about people fighting and dying, this is the same political bullshit method being used for the war. Personally, I feel it is better to be half-assing it than doing nothing as long as half-assing it is all we are capable of. Sure, it'd be great to be doing the right thing AND doing it perfectly, but that's a pipe dream. That being said, I honestly believe we aren't doing THAT bad of a job. Our methods are showing results, and we are not using the brutal warfare tactics of all our other wars... stuff like Napalm, Carpet Bombing, Seiges like D-Day... Say what you want about Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and I'm sure you want to bring up Phosphorus Bombs, but millions of people aren't dying needlessly this time around, unlike wars past. War is Hell, but the War on Terror has a cherry on top with sprinkles when compared to WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, or even your example of the Soviet clusterfuck in Afghanistan.

We are fighting much better and much more effectively and much more humanely than we ever have, but that's not the only thing that's changed with this war. More "innocent civilians" died in WWII than did actual soldiers. We had the stomache for that back then. We treat every dead body in this war, unless they are American soldiers of course, as a tragedy, and we blame it on Bush. That's a ridiculous notion that has no place in a war because it's fighting the fight for the enemy. Yes, I know that sounds like something Cheney would say, but I'm about sick of the media and the left being such pussies about this.