I came across this article sometime last year and only rediscovered it recently. It’s a good question: How does fighting them over there save us from fighting them over here?
Would someone please explain the following to me? Bush and his Republican pals tell us that the reason they want to keep American troops in Iraq because they want to “fight the terrorists over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here,” Where, exactly, is the logic in that statement? How does having American troops on the Middle-East prevent a terrorist attack in North America? … I just don’t see how keeping American troops in Iraq makes it any less likely that terrorists will attack America. Don’t terrorists have plenty of ways to get into America without going through Iraq first? Indeed, if a terrorist wanted to attack America, how likely do you suppose it is that he would go to Iraq in the first place? Why not just go straight to the U.S.?
We’ve been told that Iraq is the central front in the war on terror. How? The very nature of terrorism is that it strikes at unpredictable times in unpredictable places, at soft targets that are not specifically protected by military forces. Any sensible terrorist won’t gravitate towards a battlefield — he’ll attack an office building, a shopping mall, a sports stadium. He wants to maximize terror by maximizing civilian casualties. Iraq just isn’t the place to do that.
The war in Iraq hasn’t slowed terrorist attacks elsewhere… there have been hundreds of attacks worldwide since 9/11. So the claim that Iraq is somehow “central” to the “war on terror” just does not hold water.
Perhaps some of my friends on the right can explain this. How does putting American soldiers at risk in the middle of what is now a civil war in Iraq magically protect American civilians at home from terrorist attacks?
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February 28, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Protest Warrior
Well now
What do you know…you must have stopped smoking your bong long enough to have a semi-intelligent thought.
Its a good question. One that was answered in the first years of the war.
If you remember correctly, the mainstream media was catterwalling about how all the terrorists from the middle east region were flocking in droves to Iraq to fight the “evil american empire”
The way it was spun was that we were in dire straights right from the beginning because the borders in Iraq were wide open and whoa was us because we couldnt stem the invasion from other areas and stop the flow of more fighters coming in.
Do you remember this?
This, meathead, is where the war on terror became central to Iraq. Its also symbolic. When we win there, it will just put other mooselimbs on notice that we are not going to back down and their defeat will come.
I now move on to the next thing that you posted which is another attack on a conservative blog. You have your moments of clarity meathead, but they are too far and few between
February 28, 2008 at 2:45 pm
meatbrain
No, I don’t remember that. Do show us some examples of the mainstream media referring to the United States as the “evil american empire”.
If you’re making a claim, PW, please back it up with factual support.
You are obviously confused. The claim made by Bushco is not that “the war on terror became central to Iraq”, but that Iraq has become the “central front in the war on terror”. You still haven’t addressed the central question about this assertion: How does maintaining a near-endless occupation of Iraq prevent terrorist attacks in North America or elsewhere in the world?
It’s relevant to note that you conflate all Muslims with al Qaeda. Is that confusion on your part, or just garden-variety bigotry?
Can you describe precisely what benchmarks must be met before a “win” in Iraq can be declared?
February 29, 2008 at 1:21 am
billy Joe
I think conservatives are saying that we’ll be safe in the US if we send our soldiers to Iraq to take bullets for us and act as targets for new terrorists-in-training. That’s basically what it boils down to. On a side note, I always love Chickenhawk conservatives’ casual dismissal of the US military personnel forced into yet another tour of sitting in the middle of the Iraqi civil war as having ‘signed up for it’. It really shows the Chickenhawk’s true colors.
One thing that I find absurd about ‘conservatives’ claims that the War on Terror™ is a success is their almost complete lack of data which supports the Administration’s assertion that we’re succeeding. Ever notice how it’s almost never quantified and even when it is, the hole in their logic is so large you can drive an 18 wheeler thru it? One of the few places where you can find a ‘conservative’ attempt to quantify anything related to the ‘war on terror’ is the Islamic Terrorist incident counter found at http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/ & on many right wing blogs, including Cao’s. As of today, that figure is 10,647. What they don’t tell us though is how that compares to pre-9/11. Are there more Islamic terrorist incidents now or were there more before 9/11. Are there more after we invaded Iraq or less? If there is more now, after we’ve invaded 2 countries, spent 7 years & $1 Trillion+, then by definition, the ‘War on Terror’ is a failure. Unless you, like bin Laden himself, consider more attacks and American indebtedness to be a success, that is.
I also don’t understand the right wing assertion that we haven’t been attacked since 9/11 (antrax attacks aside). The President has claimed on hundreds of occasions that we’re fighting ‘terrorists’ and ‘al Qaeda’ in Iraq and that’s why we need to stay and fight. It’s widely known that American troops are attacked dozens of times every single day we’re in Iraq by these people the President lables ‘terrorists’ & ‘al Qaeda’. Our embassy itself is under daily fire and I’m not even sure if that happened in Vietnam, let alone any other country we have an embassy in. Using the President’s fatally flawed logic, it then follows that we’re attacked by ‘Islamo-fascist’ terrorists in Iraq and Afganistan more every single year we’re there than we were under every other US President combined.
Look at the data: 30,000+ US troops injured, almost 4,000 dead. How many US troops/civilians did Clinton, bush I, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, and the rest of the US Presidents lose to Islamic terrorists? Was it more than 1,000 people? Aside from 9/11 (which I’ll remind the readers occured on GW’s watch and GW did nothing in the first 9 months of his presidency to avenge the Cole bombing either), the only other large scale killing of Americans by ‘Islamo-fascists’ that I can think of is the car bombing of the Marine base in Lebanon in ‘83 (and Reagan promptly withdrew US troops aka cut-and-run).
I defy any conservative to prove we’re ‘winning’ using actual data. I have yet to see anyone do it – and that’s including the talking heads on teevee. Certainly rightwing bloggers have failed miserably at demonstrating actual success. The few occasions where they actually bring up the war, it’s almost always to tout some human interest story (US soldiers save Iraqi baby trapped in well – $1Trillion well spent!). Even the ‘success’ of the surge is questionable: we’re spending more every month than we have at any other time in the war and the US military is stretched to the breaking point because we don’t have enough troops. Chickenhawks are certainly not stepping up to the plate to take on what they assert is the greatest threat our nation has ever faced.