@McTag,
I think that Tico has hit on the essential point, and done so in fewer words than I would have used.
It is generally an easy matter to rationalize inaction in the face of a complex and serious threat on the basis of narrow moral issues as the author of the Grardian piece did. However, that doesn't mean that doing so is necessarily wrong. History offers us many often contradictory lessons on such situations, and it is generally not possible to know with certainty which applies.
In the case at hand , I believe the evident facts that the bin Laden organization had been conducting an escalating series of attacks on the U.S., (and in Europe) for a decade before 9/11, , and that they and other Islamists had already established a network of agents and, equally important, sympathizers in Europe, American and, indeed worldwide -- all based on rage against the whole spectrum of western intrusions over the previous century or so - and all long before the reactions of Bush and Blair, very strongly suggests that the facile arguments of the author of the Guardian piece are inappropriate in this case, and, instead something more like the lessons of 1938 apply.
The historical fact is that at Munich in 1938 Britain and France together did indeed have the power (but not the will) to thwart Hitler's reckless risk taking (spendius' assertion notwithstanding). However the combined effects of the earlier Popular Front government in France and the weariness of Britain and its already gravely ill Prime Minister combined to let them betray Czechosolvakia and, as well their own vital interests the new order in Europe they so arrogantly imposed just 19 years earlier in Paris. Though history now reveals Hitler's political vulnerabilities at the moment, the Western powers then found it all too easy to rationalize their capitulation on narrow moral grounds.
My own conclusion that our intervention in Iraq was unwise is based mostly on the observation that in worrying and taking (often imperfect) action against all external threats to the West we have created a situation in which Europe has to worry about nothing and instead merely carps about the side effects and imperfections in our actions. Perhaps we (and you) would be better off if we withdrew from NATO and its attendant security obligations, leaving Europe to contemplate alone the hazards to the east and South in its own neighborhood, and the United States to concern itself with emerging rivals.
The demographic numbers are not only convincing in themselves, their effects are already visible. These things once advanced are very hard to reverse, and it is now nearly too late.
