You can't make an omelet without laying eggs

By Chico1985 at DeviantArt.

Reuters reported that Steven Bucci, the military assistant to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the run-up to the war and today a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, didn’t dispute the report’s findings but said the U.S.’s post-invasion battles with al-Qaeda in Iraq — a group that did not exist prior to March 19, 2003 — made the war worth it.

“It was really in Iraq that ‘al Qaeda central’ died,” Bucci said. “They got waxed.” (Via ThinkProgress)

Or maybe, "We had to build the village in order to destroy it." Or, "It takes a child to raze a village." Or something.

Rumsfeld might say, you go to war with the army you have, etc., etc., but you get more flexibility with the choice of enemy and battlefield. Which got me to thinking, why couldn't we just have attacked Al Qa'eda in Russia? Or Canada? Where there's more suitable terrain for "the army we have" and it's big and empty enough that we could have accomplished that mission without really inconveniencing anybody? Just my two dinars.