If I may spout out a few ideas here, I've been thinking about the whole Iraq thing (like most everybody else) but with respect to Afganistan. It seems that if we stayed the course with Afganistan without ever invading Iraq, we may have had more success with it. Could we have had more success there?

I know that Russia never got very far with them, but would we have been able to convert them to democracy? Imagine a successful democracy right there withought spreading the troops out to Iraq. We had already brought down the Taliban and did some damage to Al Qaeda (the real foe). Perhaps we should have focused more efforts on rebuilding Afganistan instead of leaving it and causing more carnage in Iraq.

Any thoughts?