The Iraq War & What Could Have Been

As the enormous costs in blood and money of the Iraq war come into ever sharper focus, it is worth pondering what the electoral landscape would have been like this winter were there not still 150,000 U.S. troops slogging away on a fool's mission that has no end in sight.

One thing is certain: Even a modest infusion of the money diverted for the war into jobs and infrastructure improvement projects in blighted Ohio -- say a couple hundred million bucks or so -- might have made a difference and the entire nature of the campaign there, including the candidates in play as well as last night's outcome, would have been rather different.

Beyond what Ohio has desperately needed but hasn't gotten, there is a lot of "what if" numbers crunching going on these days.

As in what if the hundreds of billions of dollars wasted on a war that some great economic minds say could now top out at three trillion smackeroos were applied to make college educations more affordable, to put more patrols on the U.S.'s borders, and so on and so forth.

If I were John McCain, who has staked his credibility and his campaign on the Forever War, this whole scenario should be terrifying.

It remains and will continue to be the single biggest reason the Democratic nominee will be the prohibitive favorite as a war-weary America votes in November.