Oh Hon, I don't deserve blessing. I may desperately need it, but I surely don't deserve it. I'm just a college brat who became an academic, and have no fear of numbers. There are loads of different ways to have the discussion, I've just been trained from Babyhood how to cope with this one .

OK. You're right...step one is to sort out the tangle or we're gonna keep talking at cross purposes.

If I follow your breakdown, we've got three.

1) Is the WOT (yet another freaking TLA) working? You're chasing the numbers on this one...so I'm gonna leave it on your desk for the time being. Well, not entirely, I'm coming back here in a minute...put a pin in it.


I love the Twain quote, by the way. The way my grand-mother always put it was that "figures don't lie, but liars can figure." Numbers are useful beasts, but they're only as good as the garbage that goes into them. Important to know what it was.

2) Did/does the invasion of Iraq have f-all to do with the WOT? You're right, I just presumed that folks tend to associate the War on Terror with the invasion of Iraq. I am surprised we agree that the invasion had nothing to do with the War on Terror, but I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I disagree strongly, however, that no-one ever tried to associate the two. I will go wading back through I don't know how many speeches for the relevant quotes from all sorts of folks, including the White House up to and including the President if you want. But I'll start here with the "are you kidding me?" defense. Of course they tried to tie the two together. The meme that Iraq was responsible for 9/11 started there! I agree with you that there is no connection, but I think it's naive to think that they're not trying to sell the two as a package deal.

2.5) I think there's a subquestion here regarding whether we were justified to invade Iraq absent the WOT argument. Living in England I can all but read you the dossier (and the 45 minute comment...God knows how much sooner we'd have invaded if it'd been a 15 minute comment ). I also remember Blix's reinterpretation of Powell's satellite photographs ("they're likely to just be trucks" not likely to slip my mind), and his assertion that the inspections were getting it done...just not quickly enough to suit Bush's time line. But in the interests of keeping the playing ground clean, I understand leaving the argument about whether the danger was either clear or present or even real for another time and place.

3) Was a flat out invasion of Afghanistan an effective way to promulgate the WOT? I presume that all the discussion of 2.5 doesn't apply here. However, my initial assertion that it hasn't done a blind bit of good and, in fact, was a invasion of a country that didn't attack us hasn't really been dealt with. Totally cool, nobody can do everything at once. God knows I can't.

AND looping us back around to the first point (I did warn you it was coming), if invading small countries with tanks was a useful thing to do in this new age of pre-emptive defense (I figure the best way to embarrass the administration is to never let them forget that assinine phrase)...wouldn't we have expected the invasion of Afghanistan to have impacted the numbers?

I still have to think that we're doing it wrong. That, in fact, there's no evidence that we're accomplishing anything. And that by the arguments of the Right or the Old Guard or whatever they're called this week, failing to do this right is a very very bad thing.

G