Al-Qaeda outwitted Bush, neocons

To sell the Iraq War to the American people, Bush and the neocons called it “the central front in the war on terror,” a claim that was buttressed by false information fed to the Bush administration by captured al-Qaeda operatives in the face of torture or threatened torture.


Those lies told about an Iraqi-Qaeda alliance -- whether coerced or intentionally misleading -- reflected a symbiotic relationship that had grown between the neocons and al-Qaeda, at least over their mutual desire to kill Saddam Hussein, a secular Muslim who brutally repressed extremists and also was an enemy of Israel.
By invading Iraq, Bush and the neocons gave three key gifts to al-Qaeda: they shifted U.S. military focus away from the Af-Pac border region where Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders were hiding; eliminated al-Qaeda’s rival Saddam Hussein; and intensified anti-Americanism, which helped al-Qaeda recruit more suicide bombers.


Beyond that, Bush and the neocons upgraded the prospects for extremists to destabilize the Pakistani government, whose collapse could deliver nuclear weapons into the hands of al-Qaeda terrorists, exactly the nightmare scenario that Bush and neocons cited to justify the invasion of Iraq.


How misguided the Bush-neocon Iraq strategy was comes into focus in a recently released letter by a U.S. Foreign Service officer and ex-Marine captain, Matthew Hoh, who resigned his reconstruction post in Afghanistan because he concluded that the drawn-out U.S. occupation no longer made any sense, nor offered reasonable hope of success.


“I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy,” Hoh wrote in a Sept. 10 resignation letter to a State Department superior, “but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end.



"To put simply: I fail to see the value or the worth in continued U.S. casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is truly a 35-year-old civil war.”


Hoh described the Afghan conflict as “a tragedy that not only pits tribes, valleys, clans, villages and families against one another, but … has violently and savagely pitted the urban, secular, educated and modern of Afghanistan against the rural, religious, illiterate and traditional.”


This latter group, Hoh said, is at the heart of “the Pashtun insurgency, which is composed of multiple, seemingly infinite, local groups [and] is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions and religion by internal and external enemies.


“The U.S. and NATO presence and operations in Pashtun valleys and villages, as well as Afghan army and police units that are led and composed of non-Pashtun soldiers and police, provide an occupation force against which the insurgency is justified. …


“The United States military presence in Afghanistan greatly contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency. In a like manner our backing of the Afghan government in its current form continues to distance the government from the people.”

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Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. But his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night.

What's wrong with dethroning an evil dictator, and bringing democracy to the middle east?

Has democracy been brought to the middle east?

Has democracy been brought to the middle east?

If by democracy you mean graft and corruption, sure!

Yes, democracy has now been brought to both Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush will be remembered as a great president.

What's wrong with dethroning an evil dictator, and bringing democracy to the middle east?