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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: A failed strategy -- al-Qaeda prospers under Bush The dragon's teeth sown by the Bush administration's miscalculation and outright incompetence in pursuit of the war on terror are beginning to yield their deadly fruit. Hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of corpses after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the latest formal assessment of the terrorist threat facing the United States concludes that the nation is losing ground in the fight against al-Qaeda. Far from being "on the run," as President Bush has frequently proclaimed, the terrorist organization has significantly strengthened over the past two years. The assessments in the National Intelligence Estimate released Tuesday call into question not just the disastrous decision to invade Iraq, but also the Bush administration's fundamental strategy to apprehend or kill Osama bin Laden and eliminate the al-Qaeda cell that was responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks. The report, released by the director of national intelligence, represents the consensus view of all 16 agencies that make up the American intelligence community. That consensus contrasts sharply with the administration's pointedly positive spin: The massive military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq have done so little to change the nature of the terrorist threat against the United States that Tuesday's report could have been issued on Sept. 10, 2001. The greatest terrorist threat to the United States emanates from the remote mountainous region along the Afghan-Pakistani border. Who's behind the threat? None other than bin Laden and his chief lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahri, still alive, still at large and still directing the activities of al-Qaeda almost six years after the Sept. 11 attacks. Meanwhile, the U.S. military sinks deeper into the quagmire of an unwinnable war in Iraq, and the administration's strategy of relying on Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to crack down on al-Qaeda has been a total failure. Whatever combination of good luck and increased vigilance have prevented any new attacks on American soil since 2001, the latest intelligence report warns that al-Qaeda continues to enhance its capabilities, with a goal of striking again in the United States. So much for "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here." The news in the intelligence report was so grim that it forced the administration to manufacture silk purse spin out of the sow's ear data. The report acknowledges that bin Laden's al-Qaeda will try to leverage assets from its new affiliate in Iraq to threaten the United States. The White House used this finding to argue in Wednesday press conferences that the al-Qaeda in Iraq and the al-Qaeda in Pakistan are indistinguishable. Fighting one is fighting the other; therefore the battle in Iraq remains the "central front in the war on terror." But it's a mistake to assume the two al-Qaedas are interchangeable. Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, as the Iraq offshoot calls itself, did not exist before Sept. 11. It's an almost exclusively Iraqi organization whose chief recruiting tool is the American occupation. After the United States leaves, the small Sunni-led terrorist group will have its hands full battling Shiite militias. The sad truth is that the American occupation of Iraq has resulted directly and indirectly in the deaths of so many Iraqis and has created such abominable living conditions for Iraqi citizens that hatred of the United States is not hard to find. The bottom-line question for Americans remains: Has the Bush administration's strategy made the nation safer? The infuriating answer is: Not much, if any. At the rate the Iraq war is generating new terrorists with more than enough motivation to launch suicide attacks against the United States, it's more likely that the homeland is less safe in the post-Sept. 11 world. Add to that the fact that the unnecessary invasion of Iraq allowed bin Laden to escape and rebuild al-Qaeda after the U.S. assault in Afghanistan, and it's clear that the current strategy has done next to nothing to reduce the danger of another attack on U.S. soil. It isn't working. It shouldn't continue. It's time for a drastic change.
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#1. To: Ferret Mike (#0)
Would you mind giving that link another shot?
#5. To: ghostdogtxn (#4)
Outstanding - thanks!
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