What Might Have Been

Every time I hear about the Taliban rising again in Afghanistan, I think back to the run up to the war in Iraq. We shifted resources away from finding bin Laden, and we largely left Afghanistan to its own on forming a stable democracy free of the the Taliban.

What if we had completed the mission there and allowed the UN inspectors until about now in order to figure out if Saddam was really a threat? My predictions:

1. bin Laden would have been caught by now.
2. Afghanistan would be increasingly stable.
3. Iran's elections wouldn't have put the nutcases back in power--nor would Palestinian elections have done the same, by the way.
4. The Middle East wouldn't hate us.
5. Neither would our European friends.
6. We wouldn't be spending $10 billion a month on Iraq.
7. And, lest we forget, we wouldn't have 2,500 US military and 10s of thousands of Iraqis dead.

Hmmm.