I think reasonable folks can disagree whether Iraq prior to the military engagement was critical to the WoT, but now even Democrats and their ilk ought to realise that Iraq currently is front and center.
If the mujahedin "victory" in Afghanistan played a large role in launching the modern jihad, a Western victory in Iraq could be the anti-Afghanistan and help put the Jihad back into the bottle.
Cheers.
True. I do remember very early on, though, that Bush specified the fact that Iraq would be a focal point in the battle against AQ. This statement was promptly ridiculed by the Dems, who insisted that there was no connection between AQ and Saddam.
It is obvious now that there was, and in fact this was known at the time but rejected by the Dems (no amount of proof from all the spy agencies in the world would have been enough to convince them).
Saddam's Baathist Sunnis clearly were/are hand in glove with AQ. Obviously, they didn't need AQ's services to run Iraq while Saddam was in power, with the result that AQ was free to devote itself to planning attacks on the US, but the Sunnis certainly need those services to get Iraq back again.
And, barring revisionist historians, IMO our efforts in Iraq will go down in military history as one of the greatest campaigns of all time. We've lured these flea bitten nutcases to the desert of their own homeland to fight our brave military instead of letting them come here to fight our police and civilians. This is nothing short of brilliant, IMHO.