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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: unclewest who wrote (116373)	10/8/2003 9:58:58 PM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 281500

Hi unclewest; Re: "The Iraq-AQ connection is Ansar Al-Islam." The Iraq-AQ connection was between the Kurds and Al Qaeda, not between Saddam and Al Qaeda. If we had really wanted to get rid of Ansar Al-Islam, the simple solution would have been to end the no-fly zone over the Kurdish region and let Saddam kill them. Re: "All the more reason to confront them over there." Our FBI is pretty good at finding terrorists in the US, but that's for a number of reasons that do not apply to Iraq: (a) The FBI has plenty of people available who don't stand out in an American city, speak the local language, etc. (b) The FBI has plenty of knowledge about American customs etc., and can move about in this country with great secrecy and effectiveness. (c) The locals in this country are very much against terrorists, and will even risk their lives to alert the authorities to their presence. Each of these points is reversed in Iraq. Our CIA has few people who don't stick out in Iraq. The CIA has little understanding of Iraqi tribal customs and when they move around in Iraq they are very obvious. The locals in Iraq are more sympathetic to the terrorists than they are to the US. In the US, for example, the locals never celebrate when police are killed by terrorists. For these reasons, the US makes a battle ground for terrorists that is horrendously difficult for terrorists. This is our home ground, and it is very easy, relatively speaking, to defend it. By contrast, Iraq sees terrorist activity constantly and there is little we can do to stop it. So this whole concept of invading Iraq in order to eliminate Al Qaeda from the regions of Iraq that we had already given over to the Kurds makes little sense. Hey, if the war on terror were going great, then how come more and more US soldiers are being killed by terrorists? As far as I can tell, Al Qaeda is gaining recruits faster than we are killing them. The problem with the lack of "exit strategy" is that there is no realistic plan to allow us to leave after *winning* the war (or should it be "winning the peace") in Iraq. Our occupation just feeds the rebellion. The only thing that prevents it from being able to blow up as badly as Vietnam did is the absence of a segment of the population that supports us. It was the Catholics in Vietnam that sucked us into that war. Not through some evil intent, but instead by telling us what they (and we) wanted to believe, that the Vietnamese people wanted us there. -- Carl