Iraq was not the most dangerous sponsor of terror — Syria and Iran were and are, and the most important target to go after would have been Syria. It would have been as surely a war of liberation as the war in Iraq, and it would have cut off the immediate support of the most virulent anti-Israel terror groups, thus bringing some hope of peace to Israel and Palestine. And Syria would have had the advantage of being easily accessible to our forces, unlike the nightmare of trying to campaign against Iran from the sea...

So in a sense Record was right. Iraq was the wrong war militarily, and while it looked like the right war politically, the delays made it less right with each delay in beginning the campaign.

But in another sense, Iraq was exactly the right war. No one could defend Saddam’s government, even in the Muslim world, without essentially admitting that they don’t care about the Iraqi people. So even in our present situation, we are not in a "quagmire" unless we choose to make it one.

Record’s most chilling warning is the one about our lack of depth compared to the war we have taken on. Clearly the war in Iraq cannot end — the country cannot be pacified — until we have neutralized the three adjacent nations across whose borders the terrorists and their funding flow: Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia...

That’s one reason why it was militarily wrong to attack Iraq first. Now we’re in the middle with tenuous supply lines, especially with Turkey as an unreliable ally and Saudi Arabia barely more reliable. If we had attacked Syria first, the benefit to the anti-terrorist world would have been more immediate, and as we then subsequently rolled across Iraq and, if necessary, into Iran, we would have had far more secure supply lines and a single, if very broad, battle front, with militarily subdued territory behind us. The borders of the occupied territory then would have been with Israel, Jordan, Turkey, not with Iran and Syria.