Howells -- great to spar with someone so knowledgeable of history. Refreshing and enlightening!

It will be interesting to see if this new kind of warfare with a new kind of enemy can be compared to enemies of old.

I see two separate issues here:

1) A key differentiator is that all the above mentioned conflicts were the result of a declared war -- except Iraq. The precedent set allows for unimaginable abuses regardless of the justification for the war itself.

2) I agree that our perspective of this conflict is woefully out of whack when compared with the realities of WWI and WWII. There's no comparison when looking at human casualties and financial losses as a percent of GNP. While I do feel this perspective is a problem in the American consciousness that must be dealt with, the bigger issue is that the majority of Americans do not see Islamo-fascism as a comparable threat to Nazism or Communism. Until then, everything else is academic.

I, for one, DO see this as an ideology on par with Nazism and Communism. I DO believe the battle needs to be fought, and on our terms if we care to win. However, Iraq was the wrong front to open at the wrong time. You can cite those who love us and those who hate us over there -- both viewpoints have relatively little use when arguing whether or not this was the right thing to do to win the wider war. In my mind anyway, it clearly was not. Mostly for reasons stated here:

http://www.purplethink.com/epinion/Playing.asp

I will have a Belikin -- put it on klcman's tab.