I noticed an incoming link from The-Amazing.US: Simply American, which I think refers to my comment about a rather long illogical leap between fighting Osama bin Laden and going to war in Iraq. Someone else had written to me a while back about the same thing – that 9/11 all by itself justified the military action in Iraq.

Maybe that’s so, but that statement seems to unnecessarily cloud the issue. I believe it behooves us to keep as clear as possible the reasons for every action we take, and lumping everything that the US does to combat terrorism as being justified by 9/11 seems akin to saying the D-Day Normandy invasion was justified by the attack on Pearl Harbor. I think the actions in Afghanistan and Iraq may well be battles in the same “war” against terrorism, but they are not battles on the same front. Iraq was a sovereign state which we invaded; Al-Qaida is an organization which is difficult to “invade”, per se.

In other words, I see a connection between the 9/11 attacks and the military action in Iraq, but there were many other reasons for the invasion, and minimizing them handicaps the discussion unnecessarily, in my view.