A Free Iraq or Fateful Jihad?

[bobbcat]

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Details discussed include American intelligence failures, evidence of Al Qaeda involvement with Hussein's regime, and likely outcomes of unleashing "radical Islam, extremist nationalism and tribalism" that Hussein's brutal regime kept in check.

Exerpt:

I think the most important message to the Americans is that we have only started. The real war has just begun, and it is escalating and will continue to escalate because a lot of forces and countries and ideologies are using Iraq as a battleground for what they consider to be fateful confrontations with the West over what, to them, is of extinctional (life or death) and vital interest. Iran is probably No. 1 on this list.

I think this view illustrates how arguments over whether or not we have created more enemies and escalated the rate of violence against Westerners by invading Iraq are rendered moot. This "jihad" being perpetrated by the Islamofascists would have drawn us into this inevitable large-scale war sooner or later.

A very good piece.

[prism68]

Thanks for posting. I liked this, especially:

Q: What happened to the weapons?

A: The ones terrorists were given? We don't know. Saddam's weapons? Some were stored in Iraq in bunkers that we don't know where they are, along with a large portion of Saddam's own arsenal. We cannot find tanks and artillery and artillery shells and rocket launchers and rockets and a whole host of other items that we know existed. ... In the case of tanks and others, more than a division of Iraq's Republican Guards moved to Syria during the final phases of the war, just as Baghdad was falling.

Between this and that, we are still missing a lot of weapons. There are weapons of mass destruction buried in Iraq, and there are weapons that have been transferred to Syria. The book describes in great detail the units and facilities in Syria that are holding these weapons today. ...

Q: Why don't we hear about this?

A: That's a question that should be pointed to you guys -- the reporters. I don't know. I cannot speak for the administration. I do not know why they are not publishing or trumpeting these issues. But some of this material was reported in regional media, in the Arab media. A Syrian opposition journalist was one of the first to raise publicly the issue of Syria taking hold of Iraq's WMD. And it's been ignored by the Western media.