Iraq New Terror Breeding Ground

I don't entirely disagree with the argument of many that the left needs to move on (ahem) from its anger at the president and his men for taking us into war on false pretenses. Whether he lied or was just dreadfully misinformed, the reasons we were given for invading Iraq were false, and that's why you almost never hear them mentioned anymore. It's unconscionable, they should have been punished last November with the loss of their jobs, but we Democrats couldn't put together a candidate and a campaign capable of exacting that punishment. Done and done. Time to look forward to changing our party so it's positioned for victory at some point in the future. "But they LIED!" wasn't an effective message in 2004 and it won't be in 2006, 2008 or beyond. History will judge Dubya harshly, but the voters did not.

That said, I'm fine with focusing some wrath on the consequences. As reported today in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and even Fox News, the CIA is confirming what many in the intelligence community were arguing a year ago -- the President has given radical Islamic terrorists a great big gift. (I wonder if General Shinseki had already started a club of people who were roundly shouted down as moronic by this administration, only to be later vindicated by the facts? It's a club whose membership will only continue to grow in the next four years.) From the Washington Post:

Bush described the war in Iraq as a means to promote democracy in the Middle East. "A free Iraq can be a source of hope for all the Middle East," he said one month before the invasion. "Instead of threatening its neighbors and harboring terrorists, Iraq can be an example of progress and prosperity in a region that needs both."

But as instability in Iraq grew after the toppling of Hussein, and resentment toward the United States intensified in the Muslim world, hundreds of foreign terrorists flooded into Iraq across its unguarded borders. They found tons of unprotected weapons caches that, military officials say, they are now using against U.S. troops. Foreign terrorists are believed to make up a large portion of today's suicide bombers, and U.S. intelligence officials say these foreigners are forming tactical, ever-changing alliances with former Baathist fighters and other insurgents.

"The al-Qa'ida membership that was distinguished by having trained in Afghanistan will gradually dissipate, to be replaced in part by the dispersion of the experienced survivors of the conflict in Iraq," the report says.

According to the NIC report, Iraq has joined the list of conflicts -- including the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate, and independence movements in Chechnya, Kashmir, Mindanao in the Philippines, and southern Thailand -- that have deepened solidarity among Muslims and helped spread radical Islamic ideology.

At the same time, the report says that by 2020, al Qaeda "will be superseded" by other Islamic extremist groups that will merge with local separatist movements. Most terrorism experts say this is already well underway. The NIC says this kind of ever-morphing decentralized movement is much more difficult to uncover and defeat.

The report goes on to predict that a biological attack on U.S. soil is likely by 2020.

Just so we're clear: the President and his men have executed an unnecessary war which has created a power vacuum now filled by radical Islamist terrorists, all but printed recruiting posters for suicide bombers, gone a long way toward sacrificing our moral high ground, pushed our National Guard and Reserve to, and perhaps past, the breaking point, cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million per day and counting, sacrificed the lives of several thousand uniformed military members (American and foreign) and untold tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, wounded tens of thousands uniformed military members and Iraqi civilians, and diverted nearly the entirety of our security apparatus making us less able to respond to an attack at home. The only confirmed benefit of all of this activity is that Halliburton and others have been made very flush with cash and the President has had the opportunity to play dress-up on an aircraft carrier.

I know someone will send me an email noting that I didn't include a free, democratic Iraq and Iraqis free from oppression as among the benefits. It was deliberate, since neither of those benefits have been realized. Even if elections go forward at the end of this month, they'll more than likely not include the entire Sunni triangle and there's very little chance they'll be seen as legitimate. That's not democracy. As for the "freedom from oppression": you find me a quote of an Iraqi who says his or her life is better now than it was four years ago, and I"ll find you a quote from one who says it isn't. Saddam was an evil man who I fervently hope is brought to justice, not just out of his "spider hole," but he was, sadly, not the only human on the planet capable of oppression. Not even in Iraq.

It's also irrelevant, since we would never have assented to paying the price we've paid just to topple Saddam. The deal was a battle in the War on Terror - or, in case you're a stickler for making sense, the war on terrorism - which, even if it ever was that, we are losing.