Thursday, November 16, 2006

A Small Point about Al Qaeda

In writing about how our domestic "debates" on Iraq, Afghanistan and the "war on terror" are marred by an utter lack of sense or honesty or coherance or reason, Glenn Greenwald makes this point below:

What is indisputably clear is that our current course is totally unsustainable. That's just reality. It isn't that things have progressed too slowly in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's that the situation has deteriorated in both countries, to the point where Al Qaeda now has not one but two countries (not counting a nuclear-armed Pakistan) in which it is more or less free to operate. And the stronger they get, the more of our resources are needed to keep up. Yet we don't have the resources needed and aren't willing to make the sacrifices necessary to get them. But we pretend that's not the case by insisting on our divine entitlement to magical victory and depicting those who claim otherwise as people who hate the troops and don't want to win.


Which leads me to make a point of my own: before the Iraq war, there was arguably only one country that Al Qaeda felt it could operate in with some impunity (that being Pakistan, even though we've spent several years in denial or ignorant of that fact.) As a result of the Iraq war, there are now three countries in which Al Qaeda openly and actively operates: Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. That fact alone, which is inarguable and inescapable, serves to condemn the Bush "doctrine", and every architect of it, by itself.

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