Bush is trying to have it both ways. He wants to connect the Iraq insurgency to Al-Qaeda, both as a justification for the war and to keep Americans frightened without underscoring just how ineffective his Administration has been in combatting the threat to our shores:
In rebuffing calls to bring troops home from Iraq, President Bush on Thursday employed a stark and ominous defense. “The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq,” he said, “were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th, and that’s why what happens in Iraq matters to the security here at home.”
It is an argument Mr. Bush has been making with frequency in the past few months, as the challenges to the continuation of the war have grown. On Thursday alone, he referred at least 30 times to Al Qaeda or its presence in Iraq.
But his references to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and his assertions that it is the same group that attacked the United States in 2001, have greatly oversimplified the nature of the insurgency in Iraq and its relationship with the Qaeda leadership.
There is no question that the group is one of the most dangerous in Iraq. But Mr. Bush’s critics argue that he has overstated the Qaeda connection in an attempt to exploit the same kinds of post-Sept. 11 emotions that helped him win support for the invasion in the first place.
Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia did not exist before the Sept. 11 attacks. The Sunni group thrived as a magnet for recruiting and a force for violence largely because of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, which brought an American occupying force of more than 100,000 troops to the heart of the Middle East, and led to a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad.
The American military and American intelligence agencies characterize Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as a ruthless, mostly foreign-led group that is responsible for a disproportionately large share of the suicide car bomb attacks that have stoked sectarian violence. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior American commander in Iraq, said in an interview that he considered the group to be “the principal short-term threat to Iraq.”
But while American intelligence agencies have pointed to links between leaders of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and the top leadership of the broader Qaeda group, the militant group is in many respects an Iraqi phenomenon. They believe the membership of the group is overwhelmingly Iraqi. Its financing is derived largely indigenously from kidnappings and other criminal activities. And many of its most ardent foes are close at home, namely the Shiite militias and the Iranians who are deemed to support them.
“The president wants to play on Al Qaeda because he thinks Americans understand the threat Al Qaeda poses,” said Bruce Riedel, an expert at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy and a former C.I.A. official. “But I don’t think he demonstrates that fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq precludes Al Qaeda from attacking America here tomorrow. Al Qaeda, both in Iraq and globally, thrives on the American occupation.”
And indeed, if the CIA is correct, his stubborn insistence that we are not in the middle of an Iraq civil war of our own creation, but instead are fighting "those who attacked us on 9/11" is going to blind him to the actual threat that does exist:
The intelligence report compiled by the National Counterterrorism Centre is believed to state that al-Qaeda is “showing greater and greater ability to plan attacks in Europe and the United States”. It adds that the network is “considerably operationally stronger than a year ago” and has “regrouped to an extent not seen since 2001”.
Fresh claims emerged yesterday that agents had been given two weeks to track down 700 people on an official FBI “worry list”. One group that they are known to be concerned about consists of radical British Muslims who may have made contact with al-Qaeda groups in Pakistan before travelling to the US on the visa-waiver programme.
Mr Chertoff said yesterday: “Something I’ve said repeatedly . . . is we have to watch Europe because the growth of home-grown terrorism over there creates a vulnerability for those who might use Europe as a platform into the United States.”
Intelligence analysts told Congress yesterday that al-Qaeda’s training activities, funding and communications have increased as the militant network has settled into new bases in remote areas of Pakistan. Al-Qaeda’s central command was “resurgent” in planning operations, John Kringen, head of the CIA’s intelligence directorate, said. “They seem to be fairly well settled into the safe haven in the ungoverned spaces of Pakistan. We see more training. We see more money. We see more communications.”
The White House is wary of over-emphasising the threat because that would undermine President Bush’s claim that “we’re winning – al-Qaeda is on the run”, when the US is having to admit only patchy progress in Iraq.
Playing the Al-Qaeda card doesn't play in Peoria the way it used to. Americans are no longer going to cower in their basements, wrapped in duct tape and plastic wrap the way they once would have been. This president has been the boy who cried wolf. Al-Qaeda has become a catchall bogeyman for all of Bush's political problems. His Administration has crept up behind the American public and startled them by shouting "Al-Qaeda" for six years now, and America isn't buying it anymore. Americans don't even care if Al-Qaeda HAS established a toehold in Iraq; because they know that this Administration hasn't got a clue how to fight back, and they know that it is our presence there fueling radical sentiment.
Whether they believe in a role for George Bush's psychosexual issues with his father as a reason for the war in the first place, they now know that it's about gaining control over the oil reserves. And even THAT is couched in terms of al-Qaeda, as he indicated last November:
"You can imagine a world in which these extremists and radicals got control of energy resources," he said at a rally here Saturday for Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-Colo.). "And then you can imagine them saying, 'We're going to pull a bunch of oil off the market to run your price of oil up unless you do the following. And the following would be along the lines of, well, 'Retreat and let us continue to expand our dark vision.' "
Bush said extremists controlling Iraq "would use energy as economic blackmail" and try to pressure the United States to abandon its alliance with Israel. At a stop in Missouri on Friday, he suggested that such radicals would be "able to pull millions of barrels of oil off the market, driving the price up to $300 or $400 a barrel."
The bottom line is that this president, this Administration, hasn't got a clue what it's doing. Bush and Cheney are so blinded by greed and lust for power that they are once again going to allow an attack to take place on American soil while their attention is focused on Iraq. For six years we have been told that everything this Administration has done, from diverting resources from Afghanistan to Iraq, to massive, illegal warrantless spying on Americans, to ridiculous whack-a-mole "techniques" at airports such as pulling aside grandmothers with hip replacements and confiscating sippy cups, has been done in the name of "keeping us safer." Americans now know that they are more less safe than ever. And more hated than ever. And that this country now no longer has the resources to help keep them safe, because the miitary is in Iraq and there is no money for anything that might work -- unless it enriches Halliburton.
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