Iraq has made us less safe, end of story

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Irvine511

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the Iraq War has endangered the US (and everyone else):

[q]Sobering Conclusions On Why Jihad Has Spread

By Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, September 27, 2006; A21

In announcing yesterday that he would release the key judgments of a controversial National Intelligence Estimate, President Bush said he agreed with the document's conclusion "that because of our successes against the leadership of al-Qaeda, the enemy is becoming more diffuse and independent."

But the estimate itself posits no such cause and effect. Instead, while it notes that counterterrorism efforts have seriously damaged and disrupted al-Qaeda's leadership, it describes the spreading "global jihadist movement" as fueled largely by forces that al-Qaeda exploits but is not actively directing. They include Iraq, corrupt and unjust governments in Muslim-majority countries, and "pervasive anti-U.S. sentiment among most Muslims."

The overall estimate is bleak, with minor notes of optimism. It depicts a movement that is likely to grow more quickly than the West's ability to counter it over the next five years, as the Iraq war continues to breed "deep resentment" throughout the Muslim world, shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and cultivating new supporters for their ideology.

In describing Iraq as "the 'cause celebre' for jihadists," the document judges that real and perceived insurgent successes there will "inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere," while losses would have the opposite effect. It predicts that the elimination of al-Qaeda leaders, particularly Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed after the estimate was completed in April, would probably leave that organization splintered into disparate groups that "for at least a time, pose a less serious threat to U.S. interests" than the current al-Qaeda structure.

On the relative bright side, the assessment notes the unpopularity with "the vast majority of Muslims" of the jihadists' brutal tactics and ultraconservative ideology. Democratic reforms and peaceful political alternatives in Muslim countries will also counter terrorist aims, it says.

But "the underlying factors fueling the spread of the movement outweigh its vulnerabilities and are likely to do so for the duration of the timeframe of this estimate," the report notes. An intelligence official who was not authorized to speak on the record said the time frame is until early 2011.

[/q]
 
Isn't this what many people around the world including posters on this board have been saying for years? Everyone agrees that it would be wonderful for terrorism to be defeated but everyone doesn't agree on the methods used to by the Bush administration on the so-called GWOT. Actually, Bush has been Bin Laden's patsy, he has done exactly what Al Qaeda wanted. Bin Laden wanted the US to get bogged down in a long struggle in Afghanistan which would drain the resources of the US and weaken the country. Of course, this didn't happen so Bush had to keep going and open the Iraq can of worms. Bin Laden has changed his arguments for fighting the US as the situations around the Middle East have changed too like any other politician. He has to change the agenda to fit the situation, eeriily similar to Bush continuing to change the rational for the war in Iraq and it's goals.

I do agree with the last paragraph about how the " vast majority of Muslims" refute the tactics and ultraconservative ideology of the extremists. Terrorism will disappear when extremism loses its passive support within it's own society, the West cannot end terrorism through force. If anything the appearance of US forces in a Muslim nation just gives more fuel for extremists to draw disenfranchised and angry moderates to their fold.

Unfortunately, revenge killings and death squads leading to a possible full-scale civil war on the streets is the main problem in Iraq right now. Well, I guess it is pretty much a civil war right now. But it just makes a complex problem even worse. Abandoning Afghanistan to head to Iraq is probably one of the dumbest moves in military history. It's like a fireman walking away from a fire while the debris is still smoking with burning embers, it could, and this case did, flare up at any moment. Now there are two fires. In any case, it's a huge mess no matter how you look at it.
 
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We are safer without saddam but the bush lead war on terror has been gone about in the wrong way.

Diplomacy is the only way to end the war in Iraq , not troops on the ground.
 
this does beg the question: what do we do next?

and there needs to be more than schadenfreude on the parts of Democrats, and all those around the world who opposed iraq from the beginning.

though, given all the dick swinging and flag waving and flight suit stuffing that went on in 2003 by the administration, at least a little Schadenfreude is understandable.

but what do we do?

i'm thinking the three state solution might be the only way out.
 
Some people want the three state solution, and some don't. Turkey doesn't want a Kurdish state on its borders. Basra and its area are a natural choice for part of a three state solution. It's heavily Shia. Then there's the Kurdish region. It's Sunni Muslim. Then there's the western part of the country.
 
vaz02 said:
Iraq will be split up like India.

You mean like India and Pakistan were split up in 1947?

As for the topic at hand, of course Iraq has made us less safe! If the total idiot of a president hadn't gone and attacked the wrong people as revenge for 9-11, there wouldn't be so much anti-american sentiment in the world right now. What a disgrace! Anyway, what can we do sitting here? Nothing.
 
Zootlesque said:


You mean like India and Pakistan were split up in 1947?


Yeah as well as Bangladesh 1971
This seems the only sensible solution , all factions get a slice of the pie, however who would get what region and who would get the oil.
 
A_Wanderer said:
The NIE seems to say that fighting them has pissed them off, and that 5 years of democracy building will divide the support for Islamists and that if the Jihadists are defeated in Iraq it will seriously damage the appeal and recruiting power- you can read the whole document here, http://dni.gov/press_releases/Declassified_NIE_Key_Judgments.pdf
Not surprisingly - especially for an election year - the Democrats skipped the beginning and cherry-picked the bits that supported their "peace-making" cause for political gain.
 
Zootlesque said:


You mean like India and Pakistan were split up in 1947?

As for the topic at hand, of course Iraq has made us less safe! If the total idiot of a president hadn't gone and attacked the wrong people as revenge for 9-11, there wouldn't be so much anti-american sentiment in the world right now. What a disgrace! Anyway, what can we do sitting here? Nothing.
We went after the terrorists who were responsible for planning the events of 9/11, and we also went after those who harbor terrorists to pull out the roots of Islamic terrorism. As a result, the inevitable Jihad that was declared on 9/11 is being fought in the Middle East, rather than New York City.
 
Yes, Our Iraq Policy Has Helped al Qaeda Recruit …
Especially when it was Clinton’s Iraq policy - By Andrew C. McCarthy
Andrew



Another day, another New York Times publication of classified information
By Andrew C. McCarthy

Another election cycle, another strategic intelligence-community leak transparently designed to affect the outcome.

Another coincidence of Iraq and al Qaeda terrorism, another simplistic Democratic claim of causation between Iraq and al Qaeda terrorism (but, naturally, never a concession of connection between Iraq and al Qaeda terrorism).

On Sunday, the Times disclosed a selectively leaked snippet from the new National Intelligence Estimate which evidently suggests that Bush administration policy — in particular, the war in Iraq — has increased Islamic radicalism. As night follows day, prominent Democrats were ready to pounce … and pounce they did — even as the Times reported that Richard Holbrooke, the Democrats’ foreign policy guru, had pronounced it simply “astonishing” that anyone could believe the intelligence community might be doing the bidding of Democrats.

The once and future presidential hopeful, Sen. John Kerry, no stranger to this astonishing phenomenon, was quick to declaim, “The National Intelligence Estimate provides jarring confirmation that the disastrous policy in Iraq is a giant recruiting poster for terrorists.” He was echoed by the always measured Sen. Ted Kennedy, who insisted that the NIE “should put the final nail in the coffin for President Bush’s phony argument about the Iraq war.”

It was ironic that the familiar vignette happened to recur on the very same day Fox News broadcast Bill Clinton’s implosion. The thin veneer over the former President’s famously meteoric temper was pierced by an even-handed question anyone in his position should have expected, namely, why during his eight years in office had he not done more to stop al Qaeda. Clinton, of course, took it all in stride — going instantly to finger-wagging Code Red (and thus flashing us all right back to those salad days of “I did not have sexual relations with that woman …”).

The irony lies in the fact that there is an incontestable connection between Iraq policy and al Qaeda terrorism. We don’t need a leaked NIE to persuade us of it because Osama bin Laden stated it quite unabashedly. We don’t hear much about it from the mainstream media, though, because it was Bill Clinton’s Iraq policy.

It was over eight years ago, in February 1998, that bin Laden issued his infamous fatwa calling for Muslims to murder any and all Americans — soldiers or civilians — wherever on earth they could be found. As al Qaeda’s emir put it, “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”

This instruction section of the fatwa has gotten much attention over the years. Yet, the justification section has hardly been examined at all. To do so, after all, would not just call attention to the Clinton security failures; it would destroy the left’s favorite narrative: “Bush’s Iraq War Has Caused More Terrorism and Made Us Less Safe.”

The 1998 fatwa is readily available (find it here, for example) and worth studying. Here is some of why bin Laden said all Americans needed killing (italics are mine):
The Arabian Peninsula has never … been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies now spreading in it like locusts, consuming its riches and destroying its plantations….

[F]or over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.… The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post[.]…[D]espite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, in excess of 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation. So now they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors. …

[T]he Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state[.]… All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on God, his messenger, and Muslims. And … jihad is an individual duty if the enemy destroys the Muslim countries.


So, yes, Osama bin Laden claimed in 1998 that President Clinton’s policy was a “continuing aggression against the Iraqi people”; a “devastation” that continued the “horrific massacres” of the 1991 Gulf War. For the world’s leading jihadist, Clinton’s purported “eagerness to destroy Iraq” was the “best proof” of America’s intentions toward the Islamic world. None of it was true, of course, but that didn’t stop him from saying it.

Now, did the Clinton Iraq policy endanger the United States by providing bin Laden with a valuable tool for recruitment and incitement? I suppose if I were a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, I’d have to say it did. After all, adopting what passes for this line of reasoning, the 1998 fatwa was followed by the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing well over 200 people. The following year, plots against Los Angeles International Airport and the U.S.S. The Sullivans were thwarted by sheer luck. In October 2000, the U.S.S. Cole was attacked, resulting in the murders of 17 American sailors. And in the run-up to the 9/11 atrocities, Bush did not change Clinton’s Iraq policy; he continued it.

If we’re to be honest, however, it would be preposterous to claim that anything President Clinton did — in Iraq or anyplace else — “caused” jihadist terrorism. Just as it is inane to argue now that our current Iraq policy is the “cause.”

Whether we wish to acknowledge it or not, jihadism is attractive to tens of millions of people in what is called the Muslim world. Out of a total population of about 1.3 billion, that may not be a very high percentage (although I daresay it is higher than we like to think). But it is the ideology that attracts recruits. Grievances are just rhetoric. If the bin Ladens did not have Iraq, or the Palestinians, or Lebanon, or Pope Benedict, or cartoons, or flushed Korans, or Dutch movies, or the Crusades, they’d figure out something else to beat the drums over. Or they’d make something up — there being lots of license to improvise when one purports to be executing Allah’s will.

It is bad enough when the Muslim charlatans opportunistically use American policies they don’t like for militant propaganda purposes. It is reprehensible when American politicians do it.

Jihadists hate us because they hate us, not because of Iraq. If President Clinton’s Iraq policy was a problem, it was only because he didn’t follow through on it. By threatening to act forcefully but then letting Saddam Hussein and his terror-mongering fester, Clinton played right into al Qaeda’s conviction that America did not have the stomach for a fight and could be attacked with impunity — a conviction that was reinforced when terror attacks were in fact met with paltry, or no, response.

Bush, to the contrary, has chosen to fight al Qaeda where it is standing, figuring captured or dead terrorists can no longer harm Americans. Right now, al Qaeda is standing in Iraq, so that’s where we must fight it — whether or not you agree that we should be there in the first place. It matters nothing that jihadists will use that fight in their recruitment speeches. It matters everything, though, if we withdraw from the fight and they win.
 
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Macfistowannabe said:
We went after the terrorists who were responsible for planning the events of 9/11, and we also went after those who harbor terrorists to pull out the roots of Islamic terrorism.

BS, if that was the case we would have gone into Saudi Arabia. Even Bush doesn't use this excuse for invading Iraq, it's because "they had the potential to have or obtain WMDs". Doesn't that sound like a great reason. So let's not get into revisionist history here...
 
A_Wanderer said:
The NIE seems to say that fighting them has pissed them off, and that 5 years of democracy building will divide the support for Islamists and that if the Jihadists are defeated in Iraq it will seriously damage the appeal and recruiting power- you can read the whole document here, http://dni.gov/press_releases/Declassified_NIE_Key_Judgments.pdf



:scratch:

did we read the same document?

it says, basically, that yes progress has been made in dismantling the leadership of al Qaeda. but that's about it. all threats to civilian safety in the US and Europe have worsened, and it presents no clear pathway to Democracy. it's clear that over three years later, our continued ineffective presence in Iraq is spawning more terrorism.
 
AEON said:



Another day, another New York Times publication of classified information
By Andrew C. McCarthy



boy, Clinton on FoxNews really got some conservatives (and National Review editors) upset.
 
Macfistowannabe said:
As a result, the inevitable Jihad that was declared on 9/11 is being fought in the Middle East, rather than New York City.

And we are safer here sitting in NYC? :huh: What if that recent bombing plot on several planes had been successful??? In fact we're more at risk now than during and after 9/11 as Al Qaeda has become highly de-centralized now and could attack anywhere anytime. Who knows how many 'homegrown terrorists' it has under it's wing!
 
AEON said:
What parts of his article do you disagree with?



it's not even an attempt at serious analysis. it's all stilted and slanted and about as informative as a Rush Limbaugh speech (the clinton "implosion" on Fox?)

it has to rever to sex jokes (Lewinsky) to even make a point.

it's just red meat.
 
Irvine511 said:




it's not even an attempt at serious analysis. it's all stilted and slanted and about as informative as a Rush Limbaugh speech (the clinton "implosion" on Fox?)

it has to rever to sex jokes (Lewinsky) to even make a point.

it's just red meat.

Of course it is red meat - it is a response to writers and posters like yourself that apparently do not understand that the global jihad against Americans was already underway.

BTW - isn't it about time the NY Times stops publishing classified material. I am pretty sure there is a law or two about printing such documents.
 
Zootlesque said:


And we are safer here sitting in NYC? :huh: What if that recent bombing plot on several planes had been successful??? In fact we're more at risk now than during and after 9/11 as Al Qaeda has become highly de-centralized now and could attack anywhere anytime. Who knows how many 'homegrown terrorists' it has under it's wing!
Counter-terrorism has become the central issue at home and abroad. That's why the recent bombing plot wasn't successful. We've discovered many homegrown terrorists and terror cells as a result of taking the issue seriously.
 
BonoVoxSupastar said:


BS, if that was the case we would have gone into Saudi Arabia.
That wouldn't make sense EVEN IF the Saudi government funded 9/11. This isn't a war against one nation, but an ideology. The Jihadists exist worldwide, not just in Saudi Arabia.
 
Macfistowannabe said:
Counter-terrorism has become the central issue at home and abroad. That's why the recent bombing plot wasn't successful. We've discovered many homegrown terrorists and terror cells as a result of taking the issue seriously.

The recent bombing wasn't successful because of good intelligence, law enforcement and international cooperation—all things we're going to desperately need as we move forward in the fight against terror. In fact, they are the very things Senator Kerry cited 3 years ago: "It's primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world, not reckless foreign policy."

The bombings certainly weren't thwarted by the US occupation of Iraq. Republicans need to stop kissing Bush's ass long enough to wake up and realize how dangerous terrorism really is, and that every minute, dollar and life we waste in Iraq is a minute, dollar and life we should be using to fight terrorism.
 
LPU2 said:
The bombings certainly weren't thwarted by the US occupation of Iraq.
No kidding - they were foiled because Brittain's counter-terror operations were taken seriously.

LPU2 said:
Republicans need to stop kissing Bush's ass long enough to wake up and realize how dangerous terrorism really is, and that every minute, dollar and life we waste in Iraq is a minute, dollar and life we should be using to fight terrorism.
So WHERE should we fight terrorism?
At home or abroad?
 
Macfistowannabe said:
That wouldn't make sense EVEN IF the Saudi government funded 9/11. This isn't a war against one nation, but an ideology. The Jihadists exist worldwide, not just in Saudi Arabia.

They're harboring more terrorist than Iraq was, where have you been?

And it wouldn't make sense if they funded 9/11? Are you crazy?
 
BonoVoxSupastar said:


They're harboring more terrorist than Iraq was, where have you been?
Who - the Saudi government? Do you have anything to back this up?

BonoVoxSupastar said:

And it wouldn't make sense if they funded 9/11? Are you crazy?
No - similar to Clinton not invading Iraq, Bush did not invade Saudi Arabia because it would drasticly increase the price per barrel of oil. It would make sense to use ANWR to drill our own oil, but it hasn't happened, and therefore, we rely on foreign oil.

Basic economics.
 
Macfistowannabe said:
Who - the Saudi government? Do you have anything to back this up?

There's quite a bit of info out there, plus how many of the 9/11 terrorists were from Iraq and how many from SA?
Macfistowannabe said:

No - similar to Clinton not invading Iraq, Bush did not invade Saudi Arabia because it would drasticly increase the price per barrel of oil. It would make sense to use ANWR to drill our own oil, but it hasn't happened, and therefore, we rely on foreign oil.

Basic economics.

Well you just proved my earlier point. That the
and we also went after those who harbor terrorists
as a reason for Iraq is a lie.
 
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