Powerline and Ed Morrisey as well as AJ all have posts up on the newspaper articles in the New York Times and the Washington Post concerning leaked information from the soon to be released NIE report. Read them for analysis. I just want to rant.
The basic contention is that the war in Iraq has caused more terrorism and has been a recruitment tool for jihadis.
I think the better question would be what is not a recruiting tool? Everything from war to cartoons to the Pope sends these folks into a rage. If we come.. go.. leave.. stay.. fight.. run away.. interfere.. refuse to interfere.. respect the religion.. criticize their religion.....they recruit people to kill us. Kind of a tails I win heads you lose scenario.
Or maybe this is just another case of people in the Intel community trying to make life difficult for Bush. Like I said, I question the timing. Paranoia is catching.
I think the war in Iraq was inevitable because it never really ended after the Gulf War and sooner or later something had to give. Either way, it would have been a recruiting tool for Islamists, either because we let Saddam defy the world and get away with it or because we actually took the fight to them.
We need to stop always asking ourselves what we do to make these people act the way they do. They are not blank slates ready to be written on, they are people with their own desires and right now their number one desire is to wage a holy war against us.
Does this mean going after AlQaida in Afghanistan was a mistake? Or do the terrorists find our presence there acceptable and nonthreatening?
UPDATE: White House says this is not representative of the whole document . Which is classified of course.
6 comments:
We are in the middle of a war. They attacked us. That attack bred a lot of new recruits for the armed forces. Then, we went over there and attacked them. Our attack on them bred a lot of new recruits for their armed forces.
That's how war works. And, it has nothing to do with the rightness of our cause, or with whether we will eventually win this war. War is a battle of will. We will win this war when we find the will to do so. Until then, we will tread water. And the New York Times will try to pull us under.
Terrye,
I think you are right that pretty much anything can be read as a recruiting tool. So either we quarantine the Middle East, and occasionally depose the trouble makers, or we find a way to engage and become allies with those (presently few) who have the courage and desire to construct a vision of a reformed Muslim world that we can all live with, more or less. The Bush doctrine proposes the latter. No doubt there is much to improve by way of its present execution; but while many can point to the doctrine's failures, it still seems to me more realistic and hopeful than I can imagine any quarantine with or without an iron fist being. Let's remember all the Muslims who are still fighitng on our side. But for how much longer if we don't pursue with them a positive, concrete, realistically non-utopian, non-relativist, vision for the long term?
I also think we have to keep in mind that the report in question was a classified report leaked [as usual] bu a mouthy turn coat at the CIA or somewhere. I would not be surprised if the whole thing was not just spin, blown out of proportion for the purpose of stopping Bush's improving poll numbers.
But I think people are getting pretty suspicious of this kind of thing anymore. So hopefully it will not work.
...than I can imagine any quarantine with or without an iron fist being.
Sometimes I get a niggling urge to simple, old fashioned imperialism. Just take the dang oil fields and to heck with the natives. Could be done, although it would probably bring us into conflict with China.
I want everyone who had access to the NIE rounded up and polygraphed tonight. Beginning with the DoS. I've had it with cherry-picked leaks for partisan ppurposes which cannot be fully refuted without declassifying secret information.
It occurred to me that this may be the 'jumped the shark' moment for leakers.
It's so friggin' obvious to most people that this is cherry picking at its worst.
Even those who are using this leak to pound the Bush administration know how dishonest it is.
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