Fragments

I need a vacation to recoup from that three day weekend!

Anyway, two points that refuse to resolve themselves into coherent posts:

Political law is bad. The flaw of democracy is that democrats think we should be able to vote about everything. I don't. You might decide murdering me is legal. Or you might decide killing me isn't murder. Whatever. True law doesn't change.

There was this trend called balkanization that surfaced in the 90s and is still a force today. Essentially, this was decentralization for nations. Yes, there were nasty little wars involved too, but thats what you get when you force people together that don't want to be together. Once the decentralization process is complete, a new level of stability is reached. We could encourage non-violent ways to reach the new point, but avoiding it altogether just won't work.

Anyway, why did we make Iraq's existence as a whole political unit a requirement to our success?

That's not really all. Decentralization applies to much more, and I think we'll see less terrorism when we reach an honest stabilization point. The thing is, it must be generally scary to advocate less control in a terror laden situation. And, if you work for the federal government, it probably doesn't take much logic to realize you'll be giving up power if decentralization happens here.