"Oh come on, man. On September 11th, save troops in Guantamo Bay, the Korean border, and other such foreign bases and militarized zones, our whole armed forces were pretty much in mainland U.S. We had an Air Force squadron doing drills about what... half an hour away from New York? I'm sure Armed Forces are crawling all over the Northeast seeing how there are such important cities so closely packed together, yet guess what? They were still able to take down not one, but both Twin Towers."

Correct.

"You're absolutely right about the effects of leaving Iraw, Owain. Much as I would like to see the war end, people are being too irrational about it. They freak out about 3000 deaths in four years, if you put it into perspective, this is fantastic, probably the safest war we have ever fought, a minuscule price to pay for stopping the spread of Islam in the middle east. In Vietnam by now we would have been in the hundreds of thousands of deaths."

Lets break this down into its 2 main points:

1) " Much as I would like to see the war end, people are being too irrational about it. They freak out about 3000 deaths in four years"

Now, apply that logic to erosion of liberty. Terrorists killed 3000 people. Yeah, it obviously a big deal, but its irrational to sacrifice liberty for it. In fact, the goal of terrorism of this type is to intimidate and change a society through use of fear. In other words, we are losing, no matter how many terrorists we kill, simply by closing our society and forsaking our former ideals.

and part 2) "this is fantastic, probably the safest war we have ever fought, a minuscule price to pay for stopping the spread of Islam in the middle east. "

I hope you mean Islamo-facism as some call it, the Middle East has been mostly Islamic for a long long time now. However if its Islamo-facism, there was none of it to be found in Iraq before the war. For all Saddam was an evil tyrant, he was a secular one. Islamo facists, be they sunni al quada or shiite Iranian bvoth despised him for being a secularist. Which is why, despite his many failings on the human rights front the funded him, and gave him all sorts of chemical weapons technology during the 80's. He was a bad guy then, and we knew it, but he was fighting the Iranian islamo-facists who to our view were worse guys, as they wanted to form an islamo-facist nation across the middle east, including Saudi Arabia. Incidentally, I happen to agree with Reagan on this.

Though the current Iraq war was justified 100% on total pure BS. Independant thinkers, as some on this thread like to say, have been skeptical from the start, and put 2+2 together on it pretty early.

Now just lately, the proof has been surfacing. Sad state of affairs.

The sadder state, is that there is, unfortunatly, probably some truth to the postulation that a retreat from Iraq may embolden terrorist elements. I disagree with some of the details in previous posts on the how and why, but, still, retreating from this mess we've created may not be in our best interests.

Which is sad, because we never should have been there and created the mess in the first place. But all we can do now is deal with it.