terrorism is a malleable pov. king george did consider the founding fathers terrorists. rabble-rousers and such quaint terms by our standard but he was certainly terrorized by the american uprising and sought to squash it mightily, to no effect.

case and point, it is certainly a pov in so far as palestinians certainly don't view hamas as terrorists. many believe they are their freedom fighters. point of fact is that we are only able to measure thus respond to 'terror' concretely by the actual economic, physical, and political harm such groups have historically inflicted on us, directly or indirectly (hamas has not infliected any direct harm but the palestinean ppl they represent causal fuel by which nearly all mideast terror groups burn on. anything else is an immeasruable, perceptive and subjective unreal yardstick that has no bearing, doing nothing to inform how we should respond - to actually inform how we allocate what and how many spies, diplomats, allies, troops are used where.

net, 'terrorism' is ambiguous. you assert that are clear criterion which you have not named except allude to with big self-reference adjectives that sound horribly concrete but is actually far short of clear criterions. and gwot is preemptive. w's national security strategy white paper two years ago cites preemption more than a dozen times. the preventative couching you cleverly wordsmith here is as empty as preemption - this assumes a future one accurately predicts outcomes for based on past patterns you understand and controlled. we have demonstrated that we can do neither.

iraq had terror groups before we invaded means what? a concrete reality is that they had major ethnic groups that only got along because of sadaam. there were no terror groups, just ethnic groups that hated each other for hundreds of years and have warred in predictable ways with a long blood bathed history to boot. labeling those ethnic tensions as 'terror' just feeds into the bubble of everything is terror bucketizing and ambiguity i am blasting. they are not happy whatsoever now that we took out sadaam with no power, jobs, civil war, and death arising from illness and unpredictable casualties of war. and they, like the palestineans, with their historical and cultural burdens, were far from ready to be democratized.

to be clear and concrete, iraq was infected with the proven terrorist element al qaeda (that actually did terrorize) by us when we wiped sadaam out and let the country become a free for all sieve which allowed iran to al qaeda to enter with impunity. there latest declaration expecting u.s. troops to depart by 2013 is a polite fuck off notice; it is inverse to the korean and german accomadations that were reached by wiser leaders during wwii (after being stupid in wwi) that stand to this day.

lastly i categorically reject your unsupported assertion here and elsewhere that "there is obviously been progress in Iraq, and Christopher Hitchens laundry list of accomplishments that have come from Iraq is not undermined by your list of costs it took to bring them about". such unsupported assertion only holds true if one were omnipotent and could afford trillions dollars worth of bling to actually support such democracy building experiments. those require a lot of work, which after wwii we built several lasting democratic institutions and frameworks which were successful because we were smart enough in how we used our brains and guns and reaped far more fruits that the seeds cost.

conversely, present attempts are not because the costly seeds that have bankrupted us have not taken root whatsoever yet have infected america with obligations we are increasingly less equipped to pay back, and go to the core of causing the great decline of our republic by all numerical measures. that we are now a 2nd class superpower collapsing under our own self-induced obligations and costs certainly undermines by many order of magnitude the paucity of hitchens list of goodies we've barely managed to eeke out with iraq.

we are now close to a 2nd-rate superpower akin to british before and now, as demonstrated by our current impotence to affect russia and georgia in any way except more empty threats and holier than thou tsk'ing of russia's reexertion of regional power. your narrow slit view of the world may not be arrested by the realities of the costs and hardships that enables it. but there are and never have been any free lunches. your worldview will only survive only as long as the accrued reserves of our once mightly political, economic and military power built and handed down from past generations endures. once that is siphoned away, and that is just around the corner, you will suffer as much as any american will.

the essential strategic reality is that the arrogance that collapsed the british empire is a clear template of what's to come for us, neocon dogma and semantics notwithstanding.