The invasion of Iraq has been a fantstic recruiting tool for al Qaeda. That is a provable assertion.
Excpet that you’ll have to prove that these were “the terrorists” who were out there pre-invasion. Unfortuantely, that just isn’t the case. We’re fighting a new group largely recruited to fight in this particular war. Color me unimpressed with “fighting them over there.” And the implication of that statement is disturbing, to say the least. We decided to sacrifice the Iraqis to save our own necks? Please tell me it isn’t so.
I think you need to qualify that a bit: you are talking about the number of terrorist attacks by Middle Easterners or Muslims (i.e., not including Timothy McVeigh) on United States soil (i.e., not including those in Bali, England, Spain or Iraq itself). Americans have even been specifically targetted in Bali and Iraq, of course.
Then kindly show me the error of my ways, and differentiate between Cheney’s words (and the Administration’s overall approach), and the Lump of Terrorists fallacy I attribute to them.
Please reference Bush’s Iraqi ‘deck of cards’ from 2003, and his earlier desire to have photos of the major al-Qaeda figures that he could X out as they were killed or captured.
Kindly point out where in the article it says that Iraq was not involved with 9/11.
His quote “They overlook a fundamental fact. We were not in Iraq on September 11, 2001, but the terrorists hit us anyway,” refers to the notion that we have created more terrorists because of the Iraq war. He is making no claim one way or the other about Iraq’s role in the 9/11 attacks. He has in the past, repeatedly.
Nonetheless, Cheney, in the “Meet the Press” interview Sunday, insisted that the United States is learning more about the links between Al Qaeda and Hussein.
“We learn more and more that there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda that stretched back through most of the decade of the '90s,” Cheney said, “that it involved training, for example, on [biological and chemical weapons], that Al Qaeda sent personnel to Baghdad to get trained on the systems.”
In September, Cheney said on NBC’s “Meet the Press”: “If we’re successful in Iraq . . . then we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11.”
Bob, I think the key thing about all those quotes (and hundreds of others like them) is what they do, and what they don’t do.
What they do is use “9/11” or “terrorists” with “Saddam” or “Iraq” in the same breath. Persons with the attention span and analytical skills of the average American will hear the blurring of the two, and assume that a connection is being made.
What they don’t do is state an actual, logical connection between Saddam Hussein and the events of 9/11. Which means when you accuse them of playing that game, they can point to their words and say, “no, we didn’t say that at all,” and Wise Old Broder agrees with them, and all the other pundits nod at Old Broder’s wisdom, and you’re the one making a shrill, illogical attack on the unjustly maligned Bushies.
It’s great, because they get to have it both ways.
Or got to; the whole thing seems to be wearing a bit thin with most people.
Ho hum, yet one more day when the Bushies will make a big deal out of 9/11. Just like every day for the past five years.
Who, exactly, are we talking about? Al-Qaeda’s not in Afghanistan anymore, and Iraq’s an own goal in the GWoT.
Blather, blather, blather.
Our troops wear uniforms, and only some people on our side rejoice at the deaths of innocent, unsuspecting human beings.
Kinda like evangelical Christianity, which rejects tolerance, desires freedom of conscience only for doctors and pharmacists who don’t want to prescribe or fill prescriptions for birth control, and (as the preceding is one indication of) continues to try to deny to women the right to make their own life choices. It’s true that evangelical Christians rarely use violence domestically; they pass laws instead. But they’re quite willing to bomb enemies abroad. Just as bloodthirsty; just less hands-on about it.
Given our behavior over there, can you blame them?
They want us Westerners to quit monkeying around in their region, and will attack us if we don’t leave. I hate to say it, but it makes a certain amount of sense.
The neocons, by controlling this country, have targeted and overthrown the government of Iraq - and before things there bogged down, they hoped to make a habit of it in the region.
OK, that would be genuinely nasty. But also extremely unlikely.
You mean, like Pakistan?
Just because someone really has extreme and mad ambitions, doesn’t mean you have to take them seriously. If Opalcat desires world domination, I’m not particularly worried. Al Qaeda isn’t going to achieve world, or even regional domination, even if we pull out of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the entire Islamic world tomorrow: too many rivals. Think Khamenei in Iran is going to take orders from Osama? Me either. How about Nasrallah? No way.
So, how is that going, by the way? A guy named bin Laden masterminded the killing of 3000 Americans five years ago. He’s still on the loose. We gonna bring him to justice anytime soon? And shouldn’t this one be just a little bit personal for us?
You know, this is where Cheney’s speech turns into sheer dumbness. Just because one views a threat as a law enforcement problem, doesn’t mean it’s being viewed as a series of discrete, unrelated acts. The Mafia was a law enforcement problem, and we eventually shut it down by going after the organization. There’s no evidence that the Clinton administration saw the various terrorist attacks on its watch as unrelated actions. (But when they tried to fire some cruise missiles at bin Laden, Cheney’s party viewed it as a ‘wag the dog’ distraction from the much more important matter of Ms. Lewinsky.)
By ‘us’, you must mean Bush, yourself, and your party. You were warned by Berger, Clarke, and others that terrorism would be the big threat of your time. But your nominal boss told the “bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.” briefers, “OK, you’ve covered your asses. Seeya.” Bright move.
None of these attacks were exactly secret. Weren’t you paying attention? Apparently not, because the terrorist threat meant exactly nothing to you on January 20, 2001, nor did it mean any more to you on September 10 of that year.
If the pattern is so connect-the-dots obvious, why weren’t you ready to combat it from your first day in office?
Because it didn’t fit your view of the world. And because you and your nominal boss are great big fuckups when it doesn’t involve either domestic political power, or big tax cuts and spending programs for all your buddies.
See above. Even with the track record you’ve laid out, and with - on top of that - seven and a half months of running the country to get an even clearer idea of what the true threats were, terrorism still wasn’t on your radar screen. If they hadn’t attacked until 2003, chances are terrorism wouldn’t have been on your radar screen until then.
Well, it involved a campaign against the terror network, but you can’t bomb an underground network. The methods have to be maybe 80% a battle for public opinion, so that the terror network doesn’t have broad-based support for supply and concealment, and maybe 20% investigation and prosecution - learning their network, gathering information, and hopefully stopping them before they can strike again.
Obviously, it’s impossible to critique their success, or lack of it, here.
So, how are we holding Pakistan to account? Pakistan, which harbors al-Qaeda even now; Pakistan, which harbors the terror groups that strike India, that put the ‘bomb’ in Bombay.
And again, exactly what, if anything, have you bozos done about Pakistan, the ringleader of the current wave of nuclear proliferation? (You know, nukes - the only WMD demonstrably worthy of the name.) Big new reactor on the way that could furnish the bang for 40-50 nukes a year, and has fed nuclear technology to Iran and North Korea. Not to mention, a nation that could be taken over by Islamic radicals at any random moment. Is there any more threatening nation on the face of the planet right now?
Other than us, I mean. And yet, we (meaning you, Mr. Cheney) apparently don’t even try to restrain their nuclear ambitions.
And when Pakistan is taken over by Islamic zealots, you’ll say “no one could have foreseen” (that famous Bushie phrase) that this could’ve happened, spilling dozens or hundreds of nukes into the hands of crazy people whose threat level will then make Osama look insignificant.
So how are we doing in dealing with the threats that are readily apparent? We’ve covered Pakistan; how about the loose nuclear materials of the former USSR? We had a program to help secure all that - and during the past five years, you guys have really put it on underdrive. :rolleyes:
And how’s that working out? Are we denying terrorists control of more of Iraq today than we were in August 2005, or August 2004, or August 2003? Yeah, we’re doing a great job there. Terrorists didn’t have anywhere to work in Iraq while Saddam was running the joint. Meanwhile, Afghanistan’s spinning out of control, and though it’s probably still salvageable, we have no resources or attention to devote to it because we’re stuck inside of Baghdad with the Basra blues again.
And, oh yeah, terrorist groups may not control Pakistan, but they certainly have a free hand in parts of that country.
No. Nobody’s saying we simply stirred up a hornet’s nest. You can run away from a hornet nest, after all, and nobody makes a big deal of it if you do.
No, we took a country that people thought was a living hell under Saddam, and showed them what hell on earth really meant, by making their country far more dangerous under our impotent occupation than it was under Saddam’s ruthless rule.
It’s a shame neither you, nor your nominal boss, nor any of your crowd seem to have any tears to shed for the ruin we’ve wreaked on the people of Iraq. If you had any decency, you would resign, repent in sackcloth and ashes, and spend the rest of your days doing good works among the poor of Biafra.
And as El_Kabong has said, we weren’t in the Maple Avenue Jiffy Lube on September 11, 2001, and the terrorists hit us anyway. And as I said, ‘the terrorists’ aren’t a fixed group. The ones who hated us before 9/11 will hate us after we leave Iraq, but a whole bunch more people are terrorists on account of Iraq, and the things we have done in and to Iraq are generating new terrorists all the time.
Are you kidding?! Al-Qaeda loves it that we’re in Iraq. Iraq is their recruitment poster. The rest of the world figured this out a few summers ago; you haven’t learned it yet.
What American in Iraq is, is impotent. And on top of that, it’s a target. Swell.
Ah yes, the infamous “some people” who can never be tracked down, but say all sorts of ridiculous things. (The Candorville comic strip has been doing some great things with “some people”, btw.) Nobody I know is saying that; what they’re saying is that if we get out of Iraq, we’ll at least not be generating quite as many new terrorists with our actions there. If we get out if Iraq in 2007, then nobody will be turning into a terrorist in 2009 on account of what we used to be doing in Iraq.
Well, it worked, didn’t it? Al-Qaeda wanted us out of Saudi Arabia, and we’re out of Saudi Arabia.
But right now, why would they want to change our behavior? In Iraq, they’ve got us bogged down exactly where they want us, where we can do no harm to them.
If we spend our blood and treasure in Iraq because “the terrorists” would consider it a victory if we left, they are controlling our choices just as much as if we did exactly what they said.
How about if we forget about how our enemies keep their internal scorecards, and think about what’s in our best interests? Maybe we need to stay; I’m open to reason. But “handing the terrorists a victory” isn’t a reason worth listening to; it’s just rhetoric.
Well, ‘victory’ is not an option in Iraq - unless you have some strange definition of ‘victory’ that in no way resembles how anyone else would define it. So ‘defeat’ it must be, since you say so. If defeat is the only remaining option, hadn’t we better just get the hell out of Dodge?
Unfortunately, he didn’t say anything about chaos, anarchy, and multi-way civil war.
But his bodyguard and silver cane were no match for the Jack of Hearts…er, Iraq’s progressive constitution and its democratic mandate don’t seem to be holding up well against the Sunni insurgency, the Sadrists, the Badr Corps, and who-all knows who else.
And this campaign of mass slaughter wasn’t happening at all four years ago, wasn’t happening much three years ago or two years ago, but by a year ago, it was getting pretty serious, and now it’s a catastrophe.
We’ve been a big help, haven’t we?
Where the fuck is that rewind button? Where the fuck is it?
Oddly, the administration keeps insisting on using “Iraq” and “9/11” in the same sentence. Actually, not so odd. And we wonder why so many Americans think there’s a connection between the two.
Here is the extremely simplified calculus for me as I see it:
Quality of life= asecurity + bliberty + c*economic welfare
I presume of course that the coefficients ar epositive.
Well security is uncertain, as there are presumably more terrorists that we are combating more effectively. Also, the region is less stable and our fores and energies are now spread too thin. I am guessing the net effect is less security.
Liberty is on the decline.
Economic welfare on the decline given high gas prices, government spending on rebuilding Iraq. However, I am willing to have this be at best neutral with respect to the war on Iraq.
So given this personal calculus for me the war is a net loser. Of course the other factors that make it a net loser are the lost lives and the lost international stature.