That’s conditioned on whether we continue to devote 12 billion dollars a month and 140,000 troops to the Iraq sideshow for a hundred years, or shift back to the actual War on Terror in Afghanistan, not at all abating in courage for the loss we sustained, but even from our very anger gaining new force and resolution to go on with the war. And that, in turn, depends on the outcome of the November election.

You call Iraq a sideshow, yet both al-Qaeda and Iran have been trying to grab as much power as they can there.

Your next move, likely, is to point out that Iraq didn’t have to happen at all. My reply is that it did happen. Therefore it’s not a sideshow. It is what it is and any other debate on that point is really nothing but sophistry.