The truth has taken a beating lately. It’s cowering in the corner, bleeding and in need of intensive intervention. Fortunately, the McClatchy Washington Bureau is there.
The Pinnochio President has become increasingly shrill in recent weeks, as he crisscrosses the country, desperately flogging fear in an attempt to get us recalcitrant children back in line and supporting his grand adventure in Mesopotamia.
His favorite meme is still the absurd insistence that if we leave Iraq, the terrorists will just follow us here. He is still insisting that we gotta fight ‘em there so we don’t have to fight ‘em here, despite all evidence that he is 180º off. – in other words he is the exact opposite of correct – or to put it bluntly – flat flippin' wrong.
Anyone with more than three firing neurons working in concert knows that he is full of s***.
Military and diplomatic analysts say the president is lying when he makes that absurd insistence. They accuse Bush of grossly exaggerating a non-existent threat when he insists that enemy forces in Iraq pose a danger to the U.S. mainland.
“The president is using a primitive, inarticulate argument that leaves him open to criticism and caricature,” said James Jay Carafano, a homeland security and counterterrorism expert for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy organization. “It’s a poor choice of words that doesn’t convey the essence of the problem - that walking away from a problem doesn’t solve anything.”
U.S. military, intelligence and diplomatic experts in Bush's own government say the violence in Iraq is primarily a struggle for power between Shiite and Sunni Muslim Iraqis seeking to dominate their society, not a crusade by radical Sunni jihadists bent on carrying the battle to the United States.
Foreign-born jihadists are present in Iraq, but they're believed to number only between 4 percent and 10 percent of the estimated 30,000 insurgent fighters - 1,200 to 3,000 terrorists - according to the Defense Intelligence Agency and a recent study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a center-right research center.
Daniel Benjamin, the director of the Center on the United States and Europe at The Brookings Institution, a center-left think tank, agreed.
“There are very few foreign fighters who are going to be leaving the area because they don’t have the skills or languages that would give them access to the United States,” said Benjamin, who served as the National Security Council’s director for transnational threats from 1998 to 1999. “I’m not saying events in Iraq aren’t going to embolden jihadists. But I think the president’s formulations call for a leap of faith.”
"The war in Iraq isn't preventing terrorist attacks on America," said one U.S. intelligence official, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he's contradicting the president and other top officials. "If anything, that - along with the way we've been treating terrorist suspects - may be inspiring more Muslims to think of us as the enemy."
There is no guarantee that America will not be attacked again. There will never be any guarantee that America will not be attacked again. It is imperative that we get our heads around that, and stop setting our hair alight every time we see a brown person. (Hint: If you are getting on a plane, the "threat" isn't the bearded man in traditional dress who faces Mecca and prays before boarding. It is the clean-shaven guy in the leather jacket trying his damnedest to pass himself off as a Greek.)
The danger isn’t in waves of terrorists landing on American shores if we pull out of Iraq. While it is true that violence will most likely relocate, it will do so regionally. Some will go home, some will go to Afghanistan, and others will relocate to Europe, where there are established communities of Muslims to blend into. The United States is a distant fourth
[An aside: We have really screwed our European allies here. They already had problems in this regard, and now they are much worse; and heading south towards all-hell-breaking-loose on an express train, and the United States paid for the ticket.]
America will have fallout to deal with, but it will be economic and social. “The danger is not that they’ll follow us home,” Carafano said. “The problems will come to our doorstep, not the terrorists.”
