Over three years ago, just before the start of the Iraq war, the Onion nailed it:
Is our arrogance and hubris so great that we actually believe that a U.S. provisional military regime will be welcomed with open arms by the Iraqi people? Democracy cannot possibly thrive under coercion. To take over a country and impose one’s own system of government without regard for the people of that country is the very antithesis of democracy. And it is doomed to fail.
The editorial wasn’t funny. Rather, it was the counterpoint that presciently captured the essence of the current debate: No it won’t (scroll down a little to see it).
I reluctantly supported the Iraq war because I believed the Bush administration’s claims that Iraq was an imminent threat. Shame on me for being too trusting.
I bring this up now because I was pissed about a letter from someone named Dave Petteys in this Sunday’s Denver Post. (Scroll down to “Intel Terror Report,” near the bottom.) He, like the rest of the Right, is trying to spin the National Intelligence Estimate that says the Iraq war has created more terrorists. In his letter he says:
The assertion that “fighting terrorism is what causes it” implies that ceasing to fight would cause terrorism to disappear. This is like saying pulling weeds in your garden is what causes them to grow.
That would be true if the Iraq war had actually been about fighting terrorism. We now know it wasn’t. The Onion obviously figured it out long before I did.
I wrote a letter back to the Denver Post challenging Pettey’s attempt to conflate Iraq with the War on Terrorism. They’ve printed my last two, so maybe this will be the trifecta.
Letter writer Dave Petteys (10/1/06) must be confused. He says that the Pentagon, who issued the National Intelligence Estimate, is wrong to say that “fighting terrorism is what causes it.” In a sense, Petteys is right; fighting terrorism doesn’t cause terrorism.
But that’s a non-sequitur because that’s not what the NIE says. Rather, it says that launching a war on false pretenses against an Arab state with no connections to Al Quaeda is a rallying cry for would-be terrorists worldwide, and there are now more of them than ever. Crucially, the terrorism infrastructure has become more robust because more sympathizers are willing to support them financially, with safe houses, at the polls (Palestinian Authority elections) etc.
We’ve seen this before. It happened in the 80’s after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan for similarly bogus reasons. And the Soviets used torture too. That worked out real well for them, eh? Just think if we could’ve used that $300 billion we’ve spent on the war actually fighting terrorism…
The simultaneously funniest and saddest part of this whole issue is that the Onion newspaper, a weekly satire tabloid popular on college campuses, predicted this state of affairs before the war in a mock editorial titled “This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism.” ( See http://www.theonion.com/content/node/34144) The pro-war counterpoint was titled “No it won’t.” This nicely sums up the current debate. Too bad it took 2,700 American lives to get from there to here.