Oh I know I was oversimplifying, I'm simply saying that pretty much any different tactic than what we chose would have been better and why not one with a smaller footprint if we know it'll all be pretty shitty with, at best, a decade down the line killing one guy symbolically when it doesn't change squat?

What we did in Afghanistan and Iraq didn't work. Maybe a fast invasion with EVERYTHING WE HAD AVAILABLE on the mountains of Tora Bora in the first place would've nailed him and we'd be in and out. God knows they don't want us there screwing with their whole government, maybe wrestling free the Taliban and allowing whatever to fill the vacuum would be better than the mess we had for a decade plus.

They simply don't want us there. As shitty as their government was before we came in (and most of them agreed with that) they REALLY didn't like the idea of a foreign occupying force the same way we'd feel if we had a massively corrupt nation and Russia came in and occupied us until we had the freedom they deemed ok enough.. most of us would probably be out there shooting Russians the same way a lot of their population did at us even if they didn't like their government either.

And Iraq? Forget about it. A giant mess from beginning to end. We maxed out the nation's credit cards on that, got thousands of U.S. soldiers killed, hundreds of thousands if not millions of Iraqi civilians dead, and an unsteady mess for what? A daddy issue Bush Jr. had? He even said "There's no good targets in Afghanistan" and demanded his strategists link Iraq to 9/11. They couldn't so they came up with the WMD story.

All a giant and costly mess.

Yeah, my cruise missile example was kinda tongue in cheek, it was simply a foil to the situation that we've had for the last decade. We dumped everything, money, lives, foreign civilian casualties, all of it into a plan that leaves us eh maybe slightly better than before, maybe not. At the very least a lighter footprint achieving as much or maybe more might have been a better choice.