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Juan Cole at Informed Comment:

If the US had not run off to the Iraq quagmire, and had stayed the course in Afghanistan and properly rebuilt it, we could have completely uprooted al-Qaeda and the Taliban, put an end to the poppy trade, and created an economic efflorescence that linked major Asian powers in the kind of trade networks that discourage war and instability.

Instead, Afghanistan is still a mess, and Iraq is ever more of one. Bush has the opposite of the Midas touch-- everything he touches turns to rubble.