Iraq War Hurting U.S. Terror Fight, Creating More Terrorists
Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Hurting U.S. Terror Fight
By Karen DeYoung
The war in Iraq has become a primary recruitment vehicle for violent Islamic extremists, motivating a new generation of potential terrorists around the world whose numbers may be increasing faster than the United States and its allies can reduce the threat, U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded.
A 30-page National Intelligence Estimate completed in April cites the “centrality” of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the insurgency that has followed, as the leading inspiration for new Islamic extremist networks and cells that are united by little more than an anti-Western agenda. It concludes that, rather than contributing to eventual victory in the global counterterrorism struggle, the situation in Iraq has worsened the U.S. position, according to officials familiar with the classified document.
Read the rest at the link above.
Conventional wisdom on this one has been that the longer we occupy Iraq, the longer we give the militants U. S. soldiers as targets, the more angry the region becomes. As that region sees our imperialism continue unabated, they will be more likely to agree with the fundamentalist Islamists, and more willing to attack us and what we stand for. It’s not our freedoms they hate any more, if it ever was. It’s our imperialistic agenda, our paternalistic imposition of “democracy” upon the region, our continued support for the rogue nation of Israel and it’s unprovoked attacks upon its neighbors.
Shall we continue to “stay the course”? Is this really the best course for our nation? Or should we give Iraq back to Iraqis? Iraq is already in the midst of a civil war, and we are simply choosing sides. When the USSR did that in Afghanistan, we railed against them for it. When China did it in Korea, we did the same thing.
As Leonard Pitts said in this commentary
Before Sept. 11, this country whose moral authority much of the world is ”beginning to doubt” was a nation whose moral authority inspired much of the world. Imperfect and even hypocritical as we often were, we were in many ways the world’s moral policeman, the nation that held other nations accountable on issues of human rights. We preached that gospel to Beijing, Moscow, Havana. Friends and enemies might have thought us a tad too idealistic, a bit too naive, a Boy Scout in the community of nations, but many of them admired us, too, for our decency, our square-jawed spirit of can-do, our simple faith in the power of right.
I for one think it’s high time we took this nation back to that moral standard. That is the true “moral values” issue of this mid-term election. It isn’t abortion, gay marriage, or sex education. It’s not even the “War on Terror”.
What we as a nation must do is what lasarina suggested in this post: What I Can Do
… I will not live in fear.
And I will vote my conscience.
An Aging Trans Woman 
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