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Cliff May demonstrates the fundamental dishonesty of conservatives' attempt to connect Iraq to the war on terror:
"Al Qaeda is on the horns of a dilemma. Last month, some 30 of its senior leaders in Iraq were killed or captured. Now, Osama bin Laden faces a tough decision: Send reinforcements to Iraq in an attempt to regain the initiative? That risks losing those combatants, too — and that could seriously diminish his global organization. But the alternative is equally unappealing: accept defeat in Iraq, the battlefield bin Laden has called central to the struggle al Qaeda is waging against America and its allies."I hate to interrupt Cliff's little reverie but, in fact, Osama bin Laden is actually not facing that decision. The idea that bin Laden exercises any sort of command and control over AQI from his hut in the mountains of Pakistan is flatly preposterous, as is the idea that he's considering "sending in reserves" to replace the 30 senior al Qaeda leaders who were killed or captured last month, as is the idea that he sent those 30 to Iraq in the first place. As with the vast majority of insurgents who identify as "al Qaeda in Iraq," those 30 were most likely Iraqis who linked up with al Qaeda in Iraq to resist the U.S. invasion and occupation of their country. This is one of the inconvenient truths about the war in Iraq that I think most people understand, but that conservatives like May frantically avoid facing: Al Qaeda did not exist in Iraq in any meaningful way before the U.S. invasion in 2003. The prolonged U.S. occupation of that country, along with the years of Shia-Sunni violence, have provided both a rallying symbol for worldwide jihadism, and a laboratory for terrorists to develop and perfect various methods of attack, methods which have now been disseminated throughout terrorist networks. Nothing we accomplish in Iraq now can do anything to reverse this.--Matthew Duss
