| The choice is not between "fighting the terrorists in Iraq versus fighting them at home." The invasion of Iraq has increased, not decreased, the chances of continued attacks on the U.S. and its allies. |
| The jihadists understand that they are fighting a war of ideas. According to “The Management of Savagery,” a Qaeda manual, the success of the movement will ultimately depend on the jihadists’ ability to damage America’s prestige throughout the globe, sow discord between America and its allies and expose the hollowness of American values. The manual prescribes a strategy of forcing America “to abandon its war against Islam by proxy” by provoking it into direct military confrontation with a Muslim country. When the United States attacked Iraq, it inadvertently “expanded the jihadi current” just as Osama bin Laden’s strategists had hoped.
Source: "Keep American Muslims on Our Side" - By JESSICA STERN - NY Times - September 10, 2006 "…So we don't have to fight them at home"??? Tell that to the victims in Bali, Riyadh, Casablanca, Istanbul, Madrid, Taba, London, and Sharm el Sheik. Do you throw a brick into a hornet nest so that they'll stay in the nest? Dropping 18,000 bombs on Iraq did not endear any terrorist to us. Just the opposite. It enraged the terrorists. The US occupation of Iraq is being linked to the Israeli occupation of Palestine in the middle eastern mindset. The US occupation of Iraq has proven to be a winning recruitment tool for Jihadists throughout the middle east and around the world. The invasion of Iraq did not make a terrorist strike less likely. If it had any influence on terrorist's inclination at all, it made them more likely to strike us. After September 11, 2001, the US received an outpouring of support from the world community. The ill conceived foreign policy of the Bush administration, particularly the unilateral invasion of Iraq, reversed world support for the US to skepticism and outright hostility. [The United States] will lead a coalition to disarm [Saddam Hussein]. George Bush - State Of The Union speech - January 28, 2003) In a practical sense, our "coalition" partners consisted only of Great Brittan. In fact our "coalition" consisted only of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The British people were overwhelmingly against the invasion. The British filled the streets of London in record numbers to protest British participation in the invasion. That resounding opinion persists to this day, and Tony Blair is in deep trouble at home. "The United States is the fourth most likely of 186 countries to be the target of a terrorist attack within the next 12 months, ranked only after Colombia, Israel and Pakistan." according to World Markets Research Center, a company that provides research on the risk of terrorism for 500 public and private multinational clients. "U.S.-led military action in Afghanistan and Iraq has exacerbated anti-U.S. sentiment." Criteria used for the rankings: motivation of terrorist groups, the presence of terrorism cells, the scale and frequency of past attacks, the ability of terrorist groups to organize and obtain weapons, and the ability of the government to prevent the attacks. Source: New York Times - "U.S. Terror Risk Higher Than Most" - via Dallas Morning News 8/17/2003 [Referring to the 1991 Gulf War] "Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq … would have incurred incalculable human and political costs," "Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land." (Note the source carefully here.) Source: George Bush (senior) in the 1998 book "A World Transformed" via Robert Scheer - Creators Syndicate - 11/11/03 Dropping 18,000 bombs on a sovereign nation does not constitute liberating it. How many people do you have to kill before you reach the tipping point, and convert a nation from resistance to subjugation? |
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| The creators of South Park explained the terrorists pretty well: They hate us because we don't know why they hate us. | 12/10/2004 | |
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