While we here in America sit safely behind our keyboards writing meaningless blog posts about Sanjaya or the latest injuries to befell our favorite sports teams, a war continues to rage on in the Mideast, with no hope for any kind of resolution while George Bush remains President. The Democratic Congress has passed a bill tying dates for withdrawal to continued funding, but Bush has threatened to veto the bill once it leaves the conference committee. This despite little evidence that his surge of troops to protect Baghdad - a mission that was in all ways exactly opposite what the American people wanted when they voted his colleagues out of office back in November - has had any success. March 2007 was the deadliest month of the war to date. And just last Wednesday, almost 300 Iraqis were killed by a suicide bomber in a heavily guarded area of Baghdad, or roughly 10 times as many people who were killed in the Virginia Tech tragedy. That these people were Iraqis and not Americans makes them no less innocent. And that this type of incident happens on a daily basis in Iraq makes the situation far, far more tragic.
I happened to mistakenly flip on Fox News briefly during Brit Hume's show last night and the guest correspondents - who all of course support the war and the president - all came back to the same point in their continued emphasis on having our troops stay there indefinitely. They want to know what will happen if we up and leave? Will conditions actually worsen there? Will the war spill over the borders into Syria or Iran? American troops' lives may be saved, but will conditions in Iraq get worse? It's hard to believe that they will, but it's certainly possible. The truth of the matter is we just don't know what will happen. Of course, neither do President Bush or his conservative nutjob defenders. In fact, since they have been almost 100% wrong with every prediction throughout the run-up to and execution of this war, it's difficult not to think that things will improve in Iraq if we leave, just because they say things will worsen. Anyway, the point is, our troops aren't helping the situation at this point, aren't going to be able to help the situation, aren't going to outlast the actual people who live there, and our policies - through no fault of the troops themselves - are only getting our soldiers killed unnecessarily, while doing nothing to stem the tide of Iraqi murders. How anyone with half a brain can possibly suggest that we should still be there is beyond reason. And the truth is, they don't have a good reason - besides the "it would get worse if we left" nugget. Which I'm not buying anymore. And neither is the vast majority of non-mouth-breathing Americans.
Most of the fighting currently going on in Iraq is by Iraqis, not foreign jihadists. Shias and Sunnis and Kurds battling for land, basically, and both Shias and Sunnis battling American troops (I think we're supposed to be on the Shia side - the Sunni side was the Saddam side - but I think they kill us too). Anyway, it's basically a civil war, has been for a long time, and there's really no way we can "win" it - it's not our war to win - and certainly no way we can keep the peace there apparently, despite the best efforts of our troops. How things shake out when or if we leave is again a huge question mark. But there is clearly one winner in this whole enterprise, and how much he has gained is almost laughable if it weren't so frightening. To think that Osama bin Laden - the mastermind of the greatest attack on American soil in history (unless it was Pearl Harbor) - is not only still alive at large, but has actually consolidated and gained power among Muslims as a result of our counterattack is truly frightening. Did you know he is more popular in Turkey (a secular Muslim nation) right now than George Bush? This extremist fascist who killed 3,000 Americans is actually more lauded than our president. How frightening is that. According to bin Laden expert Abdel Bar Atwan, editor in chief of Al-Quds Al Arabi, a London-based daily newspaper:
According to Atwan's analysis of al-Qaida's "20-year plan," the organization aimed to bring about the fall of the American empire by first provoking -- with the September 11 attacks -- Washington into irrationally invading Muslim lands in pursuit of revenge. Al-Qaida's grand strategists calculated that the invasion would propel the umma, the Muslim community, into joining the jihad. Following the fall of the secular socialist Hussein regime, Iraq has indeed become a training ground for limitless waves of foreign jihadis.
In this context, George W. Bush was a great boon to their efforts. Not only did he invade Iraq, which did not have a thing to do with 9/11, but he did almost everything possible to isolate America from its allies. This policy gave bin Laden ample room to target unpopular pro-American regimes from Madrid to Riyadh. Compared to the Southwest Asian battleground of Afghanistan, Iraq is a more congenial base for al-Qaida, since the language, culture, and terrain are more familiar to most Arabs. The jihadis' strategy is to get America to throw all of its resources into fighting a losing battle against Iraq's lethal patchwork of warring factions.
Bush's "surge" only throws more meat to the jackals, who gain strength and popularity with each web-broadcasted beheading or roadside bomb explosion. Like Afghanistan, Iraq gives would-be jihadis watching the conflict from their computer screens the hope of destroying the military might of the West. The jihadis also hope to expand the conflict to create what Atwan calls a "Triangle of Horror" connecting Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon, and Syria.
And this from bin Laden himself:
All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.
Terribly scary stuff. Thank you, President Bush. Can we stop this ridiculous and useless war today and put the troops to work to find and kill bin Laden and his operatives? Please? For Christ's sake, this has the potential to be the greatest foreign policy debacle in history. If it isn't already.
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