From the Fort Bragg speech the other night:
To complete the mission, we will prevent al-Qaida and other foreign terrorists from turning Iraq into what Afghanistan was under the Taliban - a safe haven from which they could launch attacks on America and our friends. And the best way to complete the mission is to help Iraqis build a free nation that can govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself.
Notice anything there? "We will prevent al-Qaida and other foreign terrorists from turning Iraq into what Afghanistan was under the Taliban - a safe haven from which they could launch attacks on America." The implication is that Iraq was not in that condition before we invaded. This may be the most honest thing we've ever heard about Iraq from this administration.
It is infuriating to listen to Bush invoke September 11 as a reason why we needed to "get the terrorists" in Iraq - conveniently failing to mention that the terrorists who attacked us on September 11 had nothing to do with Iraq. Yes, Zarqawi and company were in Iraq before the war, but he had no known connections to Saddam. His fame grew as we made him the star of our new war in Iraq - a war which dramatically expanded the scope of the war on terror by creating a new terrorist factory in the heart of the Middle East. This could have been avoided through effective planning, but instead has become a deadly reality as a result of faulty, arrogant and pollyannish policy choices.
Iraq may have had terrorist connections, but they were not to terrorists who had global ambitions against the United States. Surely, the Palestinian terrorist groups that Saddam subsidized with $25,000 per suicide bomber were ruthless and cold-blooded, but from an American national security standpoint, they were not our first concern because they did not target American interests.
So we were left with an Iraqi regime that was sometimes unpredictable, a continual threat to strategic resources in the region and which harmed its own people simply because it could. But Americans should have no illusions that the Iraq we entered in March 2003 was a state that harbored the terrorists who attacked us on September 11.
Instead, that is what today's Iraq has become. We have created a terrorist incubator in the heart of the Middle East, just as we did in Central Asia against the Soviets in the 1980s - except this time, they aren't fighting for us.
Comments