Fletcher, hope you have calmed down now.

Some interesting juxtaposition there between some mouldy old lefty talking points and what I perceive to be your inherent libertarian hawkism.

Interesting that you call the support of the Mujahideen “ill-fated” – it actually worked rather splendidly. True, a subset of the Mujahideen went on to integrate with al-Qaeda – but many more ended up fighting each other in the feudal nightmare of Afghanistan’s interregnum, and many of those are now allies in the Afghan establishment.

America’s gluttony is rapidly being overtaken by that of China. Do they now deserve the nuke instead of the US?

Lastly – the easy/lazy criticism of Bush is that the Iraq war was a misguided response to 9/11 – of course, there were more than 20 reasons given by Congress for the authorisation of force against Iraq, and none of them had anything to do with 9/11. The overwhelming concern at the time was the potential proliferation of WMDs – the UN had a list of items they had seen , and no confirmation that Saddam had destrroyed any of them.