The Final Nail In the Coffin
Today, Bush's own spy agencies have confirmed in an intelligence report that the war in Iraq and the toppling of Saddam has actually exponentially increased the threat of terrorism around the world. The report was finished in April and is classified, but according to government officials, it specifically states that "the Iraq war [has had a more direct role] in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committe".
The National Intelligence Estimate, titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.
From NY Times:
For more than two years, there has been tension between the Bush administration and American spy agencies over the violence in Iraq and the prospects for a stable democracy in the country. Some intelligence officials have said the White House has consistently presented a more optimistic picture of the situation in Iraq than justified by intelligence reports from the field.
The broad judgments of the new intelligence estimate are consistent with assessments of global terrorist threats by American allies and independent terrorism experts.
The panel investigating the London terrorist bombings of July 2005 reported in May that the leaders of Britain’s domestic and international intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, “emphasized to the committee the growing scale of the Islamist terrorist threat.”
More recently, the Council on Global Terrorism, an independent research group of respected terrorism experts, assigned a grade of “D+” to United States efforts over the past five years to combat Islamic extremism. The council concluded that “there is every sign that radicalization in the Muslim world is spreading rather than shrinking.”
posted by Matt @ 3:44 PM
6 comments
6 Comments:
Analogy is always suspect, but try this one on for size:
The tide is coming in, and you're shoveling it back as fast as you can. You (obviously) fail to prevent the tide from coming in, but save your sandcastle. Were you doing the wrong thing?
And that is certainly suspect. You might as well just boil your arguments down to haikus. They can make sense to anyone because they can be interpretted in a million different ways. Your analogy assumes that the terrorist threat is completely unavoidable, comparing it with mother nature. It has nothing to do with the intelligence in the report which specifically states that our war that we chose to go fight has increased the threat of terrorism. Once again taking the analogy further...
If the very act of shoveling makes the tide worse, endangering your castle further, why keep shoveling?
The terrorist threat is unavoidable. It exists. There's nothing we can do about it. They've been attacking us for 30 years now.
So we either do something or we don't. I say do something.
That same intelligence report lists 4 specific reasons for the rise of jihad. It also lists solutions. Read the whole thing and quit latching onto Pelosi talking points.
I'm not latching onto talking points, you know better than anyone else that this has been my position ever since I started this blog. If a war creates the likelyhood of MORE WARS, creates a threat that is greater than it was BEFORE the war, that war is not serving the interest of the people who started it, plain and simple. I'm not saying, "let's just sit back and wait for all the crazy extremists of the world to come and attack us". All I'm saying, as I've said a million times before is that this war was a mistake, that all of the current evidence supports my opinion, and that people in power should be honest and just admit it. Democrats are doing this, Repunblicans are not. It takes a lot of courage to admit that you were wrong, but Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney, and Condi would earn my full respect by being honest with the American people just ONCE.
The only difference between our political opinions on this issue is HOW we go about combating terrorism; to what degree we conduct it militarily. I think we went too far in invading Iraq, and the evidence (regarding the growing terrorist movement) shows that this decision has actually made our War on Terror much harder to combat. Please don't read into my arguments to the point that you just assume I'm either condoning what terrorists are doing, or saying that we should just wait for the next 9/11 without doing anything to prevent it. You know that's not my position.
I don't understand how you expect to win. Al Qaeda is in Iraq. We're fighting them every day there.
Every time we engage the jihadists, we get better -- they die. Its not as if they're learning and there's going to be some super-jihadi army formed because of us. When we are engaged by them, for the most part, they are either captured or killed. Our death rate, on the other hand, has dropped significantly. We are winning this war by any measure you take. The only reason you think otherwise is because the media is shouting it continously "IRAQ BAD CIVIL WAR DEATH CASUALTY BAD IRAQ AL QAEDA WMD NOT HERE"
My solution? Kill terrorists. Put democratic societies in place of dictators who had similar goals as terrorists (Saddam was no friend to the US) and WMD track records and ambitions. As per the NIE report,
"If democratic reform efforts in Muslim majority nations progress over the next five years, political participation probably would drive a wedge between intransigent extremists and groups willing to use the political process to achieve their local objectives."
Whats your solution?
I'll direct you back to my Deepak Chopra post last month:
The secret of terrorism for the U.S. is that we aren't purely victims. We have been deeply implicated in arms trade, fomenting violence, financing foreign civil wars, and keeping oppressive dictatorships in power. These habits began in the Cold War, and they continue today. Critics of American militarism have had five decades to point out how ruinous it is for a democracy that values peace to devote so much of its wealth and power to war-making. Those critics were largely ignored. If the Soviet Union hadn't imploded on itself, we would still be fueling covert and declared military action in country after country. Now the job of the critics has passed on to the terrorists, for however criminal and horrifying their actions, they aren't insane. They know who they hate, and if we stop being in denial, we'll know the reason why.
It's called "blowback": the unintended consequences of covert operations.
First, we stop MILITARILY interfering with other peoples disputes, specifically endorsing oppressive dictatorships. Then we work diplomatically with Middle-East nations and give them incentives (not through bombing them) to use their vast wealth and resources to support secular education, to support their poor and disenfranchised and to stop spewing this ugly propaganda against the United States. Terrorists aren't born, in fact most of them lead perfectly normal lives and become brainwashed when they're teenagers as a consequence of this propaganda, of poor education and of lack of employment. These are the real problems and getting to the root of the problem doesn't mean using this line of thought: "they exist, so let's kill them so that they don't exist anymore". This ideology is so black and white, and so ignorant of the complexity of the situation. Pre-emptively invading countries only encourages Middle-East leaders to continue spewing propaganda and fueling the fire of extremism. It's a step in the opposite direction.
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