(Posted by John.)
Andrew Brown has a bunch of good stuff in this article in Salon, but I particularly want to point out this bit:
Of course, the presence of a large disaffected and angry bloc ofMuslim voters who believe that British foreign policy is immoral andmisguided creates a problem. The fact that our army in Iraq will almostcertainly have to retreat, defeated, makes the problem worse. It looksas if the army in Afghanistan is fighting a much harder war than somepoliticians foresaw; it's also clear that America will have to pullback from Iraq, and the British army is hardly going to stay there onits own.
One may not like the fact that the invasion of Iraq has madehomegrown British terrorism more likely. But it is a fact, acknowledgedby almost everyone except Prime Minster Tony Blair. The trouble is thata defeat in Iraq will make the invaders seem both weaker and moreimmoral. This is a dangerous position to be in.
This is perhaps the clearest expression of how Bush and Blair have failed in the war against terrorism. Through our own incompetence in fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now the IDF's similar performance in Lebanon against Hezbollah, the west has shown pretty clearly a few things that we wish the enemy didn't "know":