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Did the U.S. start this war?

Of course it did. Not in the moral sense, perhaps, but certainly in the legal sense. The government of Afghanistan did not knock the towers down. Neither did the government of Iraq. There was no overt aggression by any sovereign entity.

Note that I am not speaking to whether it was right or wrong to do so - I am speaking to the legal definitions.

The Bush Doctrine is a remarkable departure from the traditional American position. And I don't know it to be correct, because of that.

Don't get me wrong - Retaliation was necessary. And big, statement-making retaliation at that. In a world full of options, is the Bush Doctrine the best retaliation mechanism? I don't know that to be true.

No, the U.S. didn't start this war.

It recognized that Al Qaeda and the Taliban were terrorist organizations we were going to have to deal with, and it took action.

You can try to avoid that reality, but at the end of the day, that's what took place. You know that.

Was the U.S. attacked? Yes. We could easily have lost 50 to 75,000 people on 09/11/01. Fortunately we didn't. Still, this was an attack on the political, military, and financial infrastructures of the United States. You talk of the message that was sent to the world by our attacking the groups responsible, but fail to mention what the message would have been if we hadn't.

To start a war, you have to take aggressive military action without basis. We were attacked. We knew who the groups responsible were. We knew who their allies were. We knew who we had been dealing with in the region. We went in to clean out the wasps nest, and we're still doing it.

Did terrorists oppose the United States actions in Iraq and Afghanistan? Yes. So how can anyone claim we didn't attack the right places? Tens of thousands of terrorists disagree with your premise regarding Iraq and Afghanistan. They have fought the U.S. tooth and nail. They have killed thousands of Iraqis in the process, without concern for innocents I might add.

The Bush doctrine IS NOT a remarkable departure from the traditional role of our nation. We were attacked, and we went after the groups responsible. Where nations were known to harbor terrorists, or claimed to be an enemy of the U.S. that supported terrorists, we moved in.

Hussein had been a problem for decades. He had attacked no less than four different neighbor nations. He had occupied one, and had used illegal chemical weapons on his own citizens. He was paying a $25 thousand dollar reward to the families of anyone who would act as a suicide bomber against Israel. Iraq was a no brainier. Most of the European leaders, our politicians, and even the U.N.'s own inspectors thought Hussein had WMDs. He was responsible for the deaths of over one million people in the region.

It was thought that Osama Bin Laden was hiding in Afghanistan. Of course we were going to pursue military action there. He was known to be intimately involved in the planning for 09/11/01. We would have been remiss by not going after him.

Look, neither you or I want to see the U.S. involved in military adventurism. I thought our actions in Kosovo were extremely poor. In this instance, I am absolutely astounded to see people I respect adopt the position that we have jumped the shark in the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns.

Imagine what our enemies would have thought, if we didn't respond as we have. We would have come off as the paper tiger of the millennium.

Sorry to disagree so ardently, but I really do.