Capturing Osama bin Laden won't really help...
Having Osama bin Laden on the run, as we do, clearly isn't helping the security situation in Iraq and isn't halting the global spread of terrorism that has accelerated since we invaded Iraq. (Just ask the citizens of Madrid.) Osama's incapable while on the run of coordinating the Iraq uprising of Shiites and Baathists now engulfing our troops in several Iraqi cities. Yet the flames advance.
Jennifer Stern, the author of Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill, a former staff member of the National Security Council, and a lecturer on terrorism at the Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, argues in an essay on Salon.com today that
THE WAR IN IRAQ HAS...
*Split the allies, not the terrorists;
*Turned Iraq into a Mecca for international terrorists;
*Mobilized local Shiite and Salafi jihadist groups that had previously posed a minimal threat; *Facilitated connections between terrorists and those with formal military experience in Saddam's army, the lethal nightmare that the invasion was supposed to have thwarted;
*Increased antipathy everywhere toward the United States--a dangerous trend terrorists can exploit;
*Recruited "new nihilist minions" throughout the world;
*Distracted us, actually, from the war on terrorism.
ULTIMATELY, "it has strengthened our enemies in ways that continue to surprise and horrify us."
Thank you, Bush (and the American Media), for so idiotically crafting this horrible foreign adventure and convincing much of America to go along for the ride. Metaphorically at least, Bush is still a dangerous, drunk frat boy driver. And we're all in the front seat without air bags.
