Shifting the A-Team.

The war in Iraq was not pointless. We all agree Saddam Hussein was a vicious tyrant. There is, however, just so much we can do in this world. First, we must take care of the home front, at which the Bush administration has failed miserably. If we had to have a foreign war, the one that was most clearly justified was going after the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. It didn't make sense to take on another war in Iraq before we had the situation in Afghanistan in hand, and even now that obviously is not the case. We read of a resurgence of the Taliban, the failure to carry out our pledges to rebuild Afghanistan, and the unchallenged power of the war-lords outside of Kabul.

Now, to top it all off, comes a report from Time's Michael Duffy and Massimo Calabresi that last fall Bush shifted the special forces' A-Team that had been pursuing the Taliban and al Qaeda to Iraq, replacing it with "reservists, who rather than specializing in countering Islamic threats, were trained for operations in Russia and Spanish-speaking countries."