Cut the Baloney

They have us, you know - President Bush and Prime Ministers Blair and Howard. We’re running around saying that London and Madrid are paying the price for the preventive war in Iraq, but they’re replying, quite correctly, that the terrorist attacks on the West began long before our shock and awe treatment of Baghdad.

We say – know - that we’re right, but they simply trump us with the facts – the true facts. Or do they? In actuality, they’re simply sophists arguing irrelevant points. Our enemy is al Qaeda – and all of the splinter groups that are operating in its name. Our argument should never have been framed by stating that the jihadists are blowing up innocent Spaniards and Brits because we attacked Saddam.

Rather, our major thrust should be that we are encouraging the proliferation of terrorist ideology and the recruitment of Islamists intent on destroying us by having created a breeding ground of disaffected bombers based on a set of circumstances that have proved to be incorrect and that seem close to unraveling toward the absolutely false.

The Iraq War was undertaken because Saddam’s military had weapons of mass destruction and was in the process of developing even more deadly systems. Further, Saddam’s regime was acting in concert with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda against the West. After all the inspections and commissions, we know now that these reasons were wrong. Moreover, it looks as though the reasons were not only false but they may well turn out to be known to have been false before Coalition forces set foot on Iraqi soil.

Clearly Afghanistan was a different story. The Taliban was overtly harboring al Qaeda leaders and was protecting hundreds of terrorists and their training facilities. After 9/11, we demanded that Afghanistan give up the criminals who openly proclaimed responsibility for the attacks in the United States and for many others against our interests abroad.

We moved into Afghanistan and toppled the Taliban and routed al Qaeda. But, instead of finishing that task, we moved to topple the Baathist regime in Iraq. In the process, we lost our focus on the hunt for Osama bin Laden. While we put them on the run, we did not finish the job. Resources that could have been used in a fight that the American people overwhelmingly supported and in which virtually all civilized nations agreed were instead diverted away from Afghanistan and committed to the War in Iraq that nothing to do with the terrorist attacks on the West.

Now we have two open sores, and our military is bogged down in pacifying two nations. Our leaders have committed us to a war that is killing hundreds and wounding thousands of our troops, a war that his killed tens of thousands of people we claim to be befriending, a war that is costing billions of dollars, a war that was unnecessary, a war that slows our fight against our enemies.

Stop saying the War in Iraq caused the attacks in Spain and Great Britain. It didn’t and it’s giving the perpetrators of this illegal preventive war ammunition to tweak your noses. Let’s get our stories and our facts straight.

Blog on!

Wild Bill