It's naive to expect, say, that you can destroy hundreds of thousands of terrorists without losing at least tens of thousands of your own troops. We may have a great military and great technology, but *bodies* count for something, especially when our current enemy (insurgents) have the element of surprise to boot. As large and developed as our country is, we can't just steamroll through one country after another, when the enemy within each country is scattered and hidden all over the place. Wars like these entail real sacrifices, and as others have mentioned, Iraq was marketed as an easy feel-good story that had no hope of living up to those expectations, even if there were WMDs to be found (I saw that Daily Show interview, too, and I wouldn't doubt him; he's just too lovable). In particular, we were not prepared for the struggle with preserving order after getting Saddam out. Half-hearted efforts will just get your ass handed to you.
We absolutely had to go after Osama when 9/11 happened, but al Qaeda should have remained our focus until we achieved victory against them. Going after terrorism is general, without international support, is like throwing rocks at a bee hive or hornets' nest. We're not going to do any major damage, and we're just going to incite them towards more aggression, particularly towards us.
As weak as it may sound, sometimes you just have let some things play out. It wasn't until just over 140 years ago that the United States got rid of slavery, and then around 40 years ago we got over rampant racial discrimination. Women couldn't vote (nationwide) until 86 years ago and have been fighting for more rights since. Even if we had the military capacity 150 years ago to get rid of today's Saddam, we would have been moral hypocrites to do it (we, enslavers of blacks and tyrants of indians). Considering how long humanity has been around, it may not be the worst thing if some of these countries are only lagging 100 - 250 years behind us. And they will feel a lot prouder when they overcome obstacles (largely) on their own. Some will be disappointed that we aren't improving human life across the world as much then, but we would then gain a greater ability to improve life *here*, in term developing us better ambassadors of justice and democracy in the future (when we are less discriminatory and more sensitive to cultural).
I don't want to harp on the economic side of things too much, but if we don't adhere to fiscal responsibility (like through controlling the national debt), we may lose power to intervene in the rest of the world in the future. As such, we can't spend so much money fighting marginally effective wars while simulatenously granting large (sometimes no-bid) contracts to rebuild these countries. For a couple interpretations of how much debt we have, I give these graphs:
Inflation-adjusted debt (blue bar graph):
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/faq.htmlAs percentage of GDP:
http://zfacts.com/p/318.htmlThe first graph is adjusted for inflation, but it doesn't take into account whether the economy is growing enough to keep up (population growth affects total GDP as well). Still, it's more useful than getting scared by the red graph (which doesn't adjust for inflation), and it gives us an accurate assessment of what *value* of debt we are talking about.
If you want to get an accurate interpretation of how *constraining* the national debt is (and how hard it would be to pay it off), look at the second one. This one is complicated a bit by the strength of the economy, but considering we are judging our government on the strength of our economy (GDP) as well, it's really not so bad. Obviously we have been through worse, but we are clearly heading in the wrong direction at the moment. Furthermore, we risk taking a GDP hit when those baby boomers retire (fewer workers), so it would be wise to turn things around now, so we can afford to absorb that hit later.
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