Churning Them Out
by digby
And the hits just keep on coming. From the beginning many of us made the very down to earth, non-pie-in-the-sky, pragmatic argument that invading Iraq would exacerbate the terrorist threat and would therefore make America less safe. Saddam was successfully contained, the benefit of taking him out was not worth the price we would pay in escalating terrorism.
Now, four years later, that position has sadly been validated:
A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.
The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.
The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.
An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.
The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.
If I were shaping the Democrats’ election strategy, I would create a television commercial where someone reads the [previous] four paragraphs — from a new report in the NYT today — and then I would air it over and over and over every single day as much as possible until November 7.
Absolutely. Bush’s iraq adventure has put this country in much more danger than it was and for no good reason. If people believe terrorism is a serious threat, then these Republicans are the last people they should trust. They have alienated everybody in the world (especially our allies) with their arrogance and disregard for the rule of law. And their drive to invade Iraq for no good reason has put everyone on this planet in more danger.
Bush has been election season fearmongering all over the country for the past few weeks getting more and more hysterical, coming very close to actually shrieking “they are coming to kill you in your beds, don’t you understand!!!”
THE PRESIDENT: Matt, I’m just telling you, what this government has done is to take steps on security to protect you and your family. You asked me about your family, and you represent a lot of other people, and the best information we can get is from people we take off the battlefield, so we can act on it. So we can stop plots before they happen. We’re at war. These are people that want to come and kill your families. And the best way to protect you is to get information. And I’m confident the American people understand why we’ve done that. We’ve acted on information they’ve given us to prevent attacks. And these are real. This isn’t make-believe. These are attacks that were coming to hurt the American people again.
That’s nice George, but it might have been smarter not to start another completely useless and inexplicable war that’s creating terrorists at ten times the pace you can catch and waterboard them!
If we had concentrated on Afghanistan, today we’d be dealing mostly with the morons trying to blow up their tennis shoes and take down the Brooklyn Bridge with blow torches. Instead we’re making hundreds of battle-hardened, violent jihadists by the boatload in Iraq and getting them ready for export all over the world. Excellent plan, Just excellent. You can see why the Republicans are so proud of their expertise on national security.
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