it is far from concrete, especially after your vaguer explanation. the world wasn't more terrorized the day right after 9/11. it was that a bunch of saudis whom we funded by supporting the extremist wahhabi saudi regime, had successfully used planes as missiles and made us afraid and below things out of proportion. what those handful of folks did was provoke fear and a disproportionate and reactionary response.

before w's foray into iraq, we had overwhelming support of the world at large.al queda remained a fringe element in the muslim world. if anything, after 9/11, al queda was and is the ultimate definition of terror to the u.s. because they directly attacked us. there weren't multitudes of terrorists until w made the boneheaded move to invade iraq and engendered more enemeies to fight us on al qaeda's behalf and behest, thus begetting the gwot countermovement.in other words, it was our own doing.

by not decimating al qaeda to this day, gwot remains a collection of empty rhetoric. we have no credibility. terror groups have strenghtened and look at us clowning around unable to touch, much less destroy, them than ever before. hezbollah now controls half of palestine. russia now listens and look to the french to mediate and could care less what we did or thought. the mideast is out of control as w is unable to stay longer than 3 days, chockful of photo ops, happy to outsource peace to other lesser nations.

wrt funding pakistan versus iraq, i'm completely lost by your free association - because one thinks funding pakistan to help get eliminate your sworn enemies who killed so many of your citizens is equivalent to occupying a country who had a madman for leader how? and now, congress can most certainly do nothing certainly. that's the genius and intertia of a bicarmel legislative branch in a liberal democracy like ours. congress is beholden to republicans simply because of a 1 vote senate advantage while lacking the majority needed to pass any legislation. so the minority, in this case, the same ol' republicans, have power to stop anything they want.

if the next adminstration is mccain's then yes, we will be fighting more wars in both places. yet it's astounding to see how right obama has been with iraq now calling for a total troop withdraw by 2013 and beginning of combat troop withdraw by 2010. or that mccain now wants to put 3 brigades into afghanistan after obama proposed putting 2 there months ago citing the obvious fact how off the ball we've been at rooting out actual terror, versus shadowy vague shifting no results 'gwot' slogan-ware.

we're less safe now than before around the world. we have a boatload more enemies. we're bleeding ourselves dry with nothing to show except more blood and debt. following the path of the british empire we're boiling into a steep decline and a minority of sadistic trolly frogs are begging for more. i'm fine if it was just you and your ideological kind and your children that had to fight and pay for this bull. but no, your kind are doing just most of the talking and baiting. meanwhile, the poor have to do the actual fighting, the rich blue states have to pay for it while red states also sucking us dry, meanwhile y'all just spewing the same ol' fear-mongering bait that keep the flames burning, and for what.