At last, we have reached the culmination of dubya's War on Terra. We are going to try (and execute) six men involved in planning and carrying out the crimes of 9/11/2001. That's right, six men. When I read their names, I had only heard of three of them. And I pay attention. Most of Amurka will only have heard of Kahlid Sheikh Mohammed, and honestly I think that's because any time he's mentioned in the media it is accompanied by the bed-head picture from when he was captured while sleeping in Pakistan. It's the classic "gotcha" picture that reality-television America loves. (hee-hee, stoopid terrorist)

That was in March of 2003, by the way. I checked for the other five and found they've all been in custody since at least 2003. None of these guys is Iraqi, nor were any of them captured in Iraq. Going on five years in-country and we haven't captured a bad guy worth killing. Wow. It's almost like the whole invasion and occupation of Iraq was just an enormously stupid boondoggle or something. Even if I go ahead and add in the various al-Qaida lieutenants and the parade of al-Qaida number three men we've killed, and give dubya the benefit of the doubt in assuming he will eventually catch Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and, who knows, maybe a few additional number three men along with them, that still adds up to several billion dollars per boogeyman. We're certainly not getting much bang for our buck out of this War on Terra.

My imagination conjures up a big ol' what if. As in, what if, after 9/11, our preznit had kept his eye on the ball, sent the 150,000 troops currently in Iraq into Afghanistan and yes, Pakistan, and told them they could go home when they dragged Osama bin Laden's bony, dead ass out of the mountains? What if he had treated al-Qaida as the band of common and cowardly criminals that it was, instead of as some kind of evil super-villain from which he had to protect Amurka?

These trials and executions could have been long over, and an angry America could have moved on a little by now. Instead our preznit and his band of PNAC patriots hyped the hate in pursuit of Iraqi subjugation. I know my what ifs don't support the troops, but I can't help wondering what the consequences of not invading Iraq would have been. The worst scenario I can come up with is that Saddam would still be brandishing his imaginary WMDs at his neighbors and claiming his dick was bigger than dubya's. I'm sure the rest of the world would still think our preznit was a buffoon, but there's a chance they would think he was a somewhat competent buffoon. I could have lived with that.