From this morning’s New York Times:
Of course, we should be glad that the Iraq war was swifter than even its proponents had expected, and that a vicious tyrant was removed from power. But the aftermath has been another story. America has created — not through malevolence but through negligence — precisely the situation the Bush administration has described as a breeding ground for terrorists: a state unable to control its borders or provide for its citizens’ rudimentary needs.
— snip —
Hassan Nasrallah, head of the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah, told a crowd of 150,000 in a March religious observance that the United States was trying to create a “tragedy for humanity and to spread chaos in the world” and predicted that the people of Iraq and the region would “welcome American troops with rifles, blood, arms, martyrdom.”
The occupation has given disparate groups from various countries a common battlefield on which to fight a common enemy. Hamid Mir, a biographer of Osama bin Laden, has been traveling in Iraq and told me that Hezbollah has greatly stepped up its activities not only in Shiite regions but also in Baghdad.
So maybe there really is a “flypaper strategy,” or at least an unintended “flypaper byproduct” — if by “flypaper” you mean “creating even more terrorists and sending them in to kill our own troops and civilians.”
Carnage=victory. Great plan, guys.
Or as Maureen Dowd puts it:
The Bush team has now created the very monster that it conjured up to alarm Americans into backing a war on Iraq.
Rushing to pummel Iraq after 9/11, Bush officials ginned up links between Saddam and Al Qaeda. They made it sound as if Islamic fighters on a jihad against America were slouching toward Baghdad to join forces with murderous Iraqis.
There was scant evidence of it then, but it’s coming true now.
Meanwhile, of course, the Bush Administration continues to support the troops in its own inimitable fashion.