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So many confuse Natiuonalism with Patriotism. What I see at this site is blatant, single minded Nationalism.

I take it you prefer double-minded thinking? Also, please first define "nationalism" and then give evidence thereof.

I served during the Vietnam war...

My younger brother is in Afghanistan and was nearly killed in March and he will be there another 5 months. And your point is...?

I support the rational use of force, I support honesty and integrity, and I support all of our troops.

Well, I suppose it goes without saying that we here at Free Republic support the use of force only in the most irrational way possible, we prefer dishonesty even when honesty would help us, we hate integrity, and we support only our favorite troops, i.e., those who are the coolest-looking or have the neatest nicknames, look best in spandex, can play a mean guitar, or can turn their eyelids inside out and make the best artificial armpit f@rt sound.

However, support of the troops should not be confused with support for the war in Iraq, or support for the policy that placed us in this war.

Then neither should support for John Kerry last Fall be confused with support for him becoming president.

There has been no demonstrataion of a nexus between terrorism and this war...

FALSE. Apparently you plug your ears and hum really loud when this "nexus" is demonstrated over and over.

Hussein was harboring and supporting terrorists -- from Abu Abbas (the guy who hijacked the Achille Lauro and threw Leon Klinghoffer overboard) to Al Qaeda -- since the 1980's. He supported Zarqawi and his AQ splinter group in the north, which subsequently put together a plot to gas Jordanian police HQ and the American embassy in Jordan with chem weapons that was foiled by Jordanian intel in April 2003. At Salman Pak there was the shell of an airliner where terrorists practiced hijacking. Before he was toppled, Saddam was sending $25,000 to each Palestinan family that sent a child into Israel for a suicide bombing. Hassan al Turabi, leader of Sudan in the late 1980's and early 1990's, brokered meetings between Hussein and his underlings and Al Qaeda leaders. The list goes on and on and on and on and on (See "The Connection" by Stephen F. Hayes - Harper Collins).

All of the above is paramount, far above whether not WMD were found in Iraq -- and they were in small amounts, as was a just-in-time delivery system designed to very quickly manufacture such weapons the moment inspectors left (read the final reports by David Kay and Charles Duelfer, the UN inspectors). Nobody complained in the days after 9/11 when Bush stated that any state that harbored Islamic terrorists was our enemy and that they would pay the price. Everybody was fine with that idea then but apparently he wasn't supposed to really mean it after everyone's emotions of the moment died down. The Oprah-fication of America continues...

You are probably trying to narrow the definition of "nexus" (which is to say 'connection') to mean that if Saddam was not sitting right at the table planning 9/11, then there is no connection. This is roughly equivalent to saying there was no connection between the ships of the fleet that attacked Pearl Harbor and the rest of the Japanese Navy.

The degree of terrorist activity in Iraq is the result of our being there; i.e., the terrorism wasn't there prior.

This might have something to do with why the degree of terrorist activity in the USA is near zero -- in terms of actual terrorist events. Better to fight them there than here. Here we have to jump through all kinds of legal hoops designed to make the bad guys win. There they continue to funnel their jihadi "soldiers" directly into a meatgrinder like sticks thrown into a woodchipper. Iraq is a quagmire all right -- for them. The US military serves as both the bait and the trap.

And please, don't say that I a support Saddam Hussein or his regime - it was horrible, but there are also many other horrible regimes throughout the world, and we don't take unilateral and unprovoked action against them.

This is childish, nyah-nyah, nyah-nyah, nyaaaah---nyaaaah logic. Because we are not taking on all the bullies of the world at once, we are hypocrites if we take on ANY of them -- equivalent to saying that you are a hypocrite if you give money to any charities because you're not giving to ALL of them.

We didn't even take on every bully in WW2 -- we even allied ourselves with one of them, Stalin. Should we not have done that either?

We should not have gone to Iraq, and now that we are there and the stated reason for doing so has been shown to be false, we should withdraw as soon as possible.

I repeat: Any state that harbors Islamic terrorists and terror organizations is fair game.

Will there be chaos in Iraq? Sure, but probably no worse than it is now.

There was very little chaos in Nazi Germany after Krystallnacht. The amount of "chaos" is beside the point. Who wins before the chaos ends IS the point. I'll give you a hint who won on Krystallnacht -- it wasn't the Jews...

The administration reports that the insurgency is not representative of the Iraqis, and that almost all Iraqis are on the side of democracy. If this is, then our withdrawal will not have a great effect on their progress.

No great effect at all...no more than letting a child drive a car solo without learning where the brake pedal is first.

What a withdrawal will do is spare other people from having their children put in harms way, when such is not necessary.

If you think that withdrawal "will spare other people from having their children put in harm's way", then you do not understand the nature of the enemy we face.

We are not protecting our country from terrorism by being there, and I would say that we are honoring our troops by taking all necessary action to withdraw them from a war based on bogus reasons, rather than stubbornly staying there as an act of Nationalism (i.e., our country, right or wrong).

What were your bogus reasons for saying the war was "based on bogus reasons" again?

Calling the Iraq Campaign a "war" is bogus. It is but one theater in a larger war on Islamic terrorism -- further evidence that you do not understand the nature of the enemy we face.

We ARE in fact protecting our country from terrorism by being there because the only way to defeat our enemy is to drain the swamp that breeds them. Democratizing the Middle East is our only hope: if we fail, they will eventually get their hands on nukes and either kill or enslave us all. Tell your female friends and family to start sewing up their radiation-proof burkas...