Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Fahrenheit 9/11: Michael Moore's Masterpiece -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (1611)	7/2/2004 1:01:17 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2772

The Wrong War _______________ Backdraft: How the war in Iraq has fueled Al Qaeda and ignited its dream of global jihad. By Peter Bergen July/August 2004 Issue Mother Jones President Bush's May 2003 announcement aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln that "major combat operations" had ended in Iraq has been replayed endlessly. What is less well remembered is just what the president claimed the United States had accomplished. "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11th, 2001," he declared. The defeat of Saddam Hussein, he told the American people, was "a crucial advance in the campaign against terror." In fact, the consensus now emerging among a wide range of intelligence and counterterrorism professionals is that the opposite is true: The invasion of Iraq not only failed to help the war on terrorism, but it represented a substantial setback. In more than a dozen interviews, experts both within and outside the U.S. government laid out a stark analysis of how the war has hampered the campaign against Al Qaeda. Not only, they point out, did the war divert resources and attention away from Afghanistan, seriously damaging the prospects of capturing Al Qaeda leaders, but it has also opened a new front for terrorists in Iraq and created a new justification for attacking Westerners around the world. Perhaps most important, it has dramatically speeded up the process by which Al Qaeda the organization has morphed into a broad-based ideological movement—a shift, in effect, from bin Laden to bin Ladenism. "If Osama believed in Christmas, this is what he'd want under his Christmas tree," one senior intelligence official told me. Another counterterrorism official suggests that Iraq might begin to resemble "Afghanistan 1996," a reference to the year that bin Laden seized on Afghanistan, a chaotic failed state, as his new base of operations. Even Kenneth Pollack, one of the nation's leading experts on Iraq, whose book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq made the most authoritative case for overthrowing Saddam Hussein, says, "My instinct tells me that the Iraq war has hindered the war on terrorism. You had to deal with Al Qaeda first, not Saddam. We had not crippled the Al Qaeda organization when we embarked on the Iraq war." The damage to U.S. interests is hard to overestimate. Rohan Gunaratna, a Sri Lankan academic who is regarded as one of the world's leading authorities on Al Qaeda, points out that "sadness and anger about Iraq, even among moderate Muslims, is being harnessed and exploited by terrorist and extremist groups worldwide to grow in strength, size, and influence." Similarly, Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of counterterrorism at the CIA under presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, says the Iraq war "accelerated terrorism" by "metastasizing" Al Qaeda. Today, Al Qaeda is more than the narrowly defined group that attacked the United States on September 11, 2001; it is a growing global movement that has been energized by the war in Iraq. __________________________________ Peter Bergen is the author of the New York Times best-seller Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden. He is CNN's terrorism analyst and has written for such publications as the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and The New Republic. A fellow at the New America Foundation, Bergen is also an adjunct professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. motherjones.com

To: American Spirit who wrote (1611)	7/2/2004 1:36:02 AM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2772

I think that number may under-report the mercenaries, umm, security forces, that have died as well. One could say, "They plays the game, they takes their chances." but I still feel bad for anyone who lost a son or daughter, brother or sister, cousin or nephew, to this mess. Quite honestly, I'd rather an intelligent skilled young man was creating solar cell production facilities for $100k/yr than wisking Iraqis from their beds in the middle of the night for a subsidiary of Haliburton for the same salary. Not all opportunities are equal. And the long term payoff for America getting off their oil jones is going to make the world safer for my children. If we had started to get ourselves off the oil habit 30 years ago when the FIRST Arab oil embargo happened (and only 30% of our oil was from international sources), we'd never have had to deal with 9/11 IMO. We are not going to see an end to this until there is a resolution on our part to see some aspects of the Arab side of the equation. And that doesn't mean giving in to terrorists.