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Emboldening our Enemies
by Martin Eden
22,000 more American soldiers are being sent into the Iraqi meat grinder in a “surge” that is supposed to suppress the violence after nearly four years of similar efforts have failed. We are told this is necessary because abandoning Iraq to the chaos which followed our invasion will create a haven for terrorists that will destabilize the region and pose a dire threat to the United States.
This is not the first time we have heard dire warnings about Iraq. Our invasion was predicated on the “grave and gathering threat” posed by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and an alliance with the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11, both of which proved as false as the rosy predictions of a “cakewalk” through the streets of Baghdad.
The streets of Baghdad are now a killing ground in a civil war of sectarian hatreds that will not be reconciled by any application of US military force. The brutal tyrant we deposed had held together this fractious nation state that served our interests as a bastion against the Shiite Islamic revolutionaries in neighboring Iran. Now the long-suppressed Shiite majority in Iraq has gained power, and the prime minister we are counting upon as a partner is in fact more closely partnered with the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr who is as much our enemy as the mullahs in Iran.
Iran, which had twice elected a moderate reformer as president, has elected a radical firebrand and has accelerated its nuclear program as well as its support of Hezbollah militants in Lebanon.
The Israeli/Palestinian conflict, far from being resolved by the invasion of Iraq, has added a bloody internecine feud between rival Palestinian factions on top of the cycle of violence with Israel.
Afghanistan is devolving into a failed nation-building operation and a narco-state. Pakistan – our erstwhile ally in the war on terror – has entered into a non-aggression pact with Taliban and al Qaeda fighters who strike Afghanistan from the Pakistani border.
Al Qaeda – the terrorist organization that attacked us on 9/11 – now has a much stronger presence in Iraq. Our invasion and occupation of a Muslim country has attracted jihadis and turned Iraq (according to the CIA’s National Intelligence Council) into the recruiting and training ground for the next generation of professional terrorists.
The United States of America – once the respected leader of the free world – has alienated its friends, multiplied its enemies, sullied its national honor, and done more harm to itself than its external enemies are capable of.
The American people -- who embraced and trusted their president in the wake of the attack on our nation – have come to realize he misled us into an unnecessary war and mismanaged it into an unwinnable quagmire. After wasting half a trillion dollars and more than 3000 American lives, his only solution is to sacrifice more young Americans and sink us deeper in debt with the same failed course of action.
When the representatives of the American people in Congress including members of the president’s own party finally begin to assert their constitutional duty by voicing long overdue criticism and demanding a different course, the response of the president is to level charges that such criticisms are emboldening our enemies.
Emboldening our enemies?
Words fail to describe the moral bankruptcy of a president that levels such charges after he has done more to multiply, empower, and embolden our nation’s enemies than could have been imagined four years ago.
The enormity of the disaster that has befallen our country and Iraq at the hands of this president dwarfs any previous crime or misdemeanor by a chief executive. The American people shouldn’t be asking whether they should support this president’s surge in Iraq. They should ask themselves whether we can afford to let George W. Bush remain in office to continue emboldening our enemies.
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