Yes, I know, you already knew that, but I have to complain about the President’s speech Monday night.
There was a bunch of Roosevelt-invoking garbage in there, obviously, but there’s one particular lie that Bush will not stop telling the people of this country, which, due to its total absurdity, is beginning to chap my Texas hide.
So let’s get this straight once and for all: If America leaves Iraq, the chances that al Qaeda will take over and use the oil money to build a giant al Qaeda Caliphate to take over the world are LESS THAN NOTHING.
The Sunni foreign fighter “al Qaeda types” in Iraq have NEVER made up more than a few percentage points worth of the insurgency. If the U.S. government leaves now, with the current government in place, the dominant force in that country will be Iran, not al Qaeda.
Even if the country splits into three, the new Sunni state will be dominated by people from there: Either the former Baathists or the local religious leaders will rise to the top. The idea that some Saudis and Egyptians – in exile on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border – could come and dominate the locals (who have held their own against the U.S. Army for over three years) is, in the words of incomparable investigative reporter, Robert Dreyfuss, “utterly stupid.” And there are no oil wells under the Sunni triangle anyway – it’s all near Kirkuk in the north and Basra in the south.
Besides, everyone knows that the invasion and occupation are radicalizing people who had nothing to do with al Qaeda before 9/11. Well, at least, that’s according to the former CIA director, the CIA’s National Intelligence Council, former CIA agents, the FBI, the RIIA, the Saudis and the Israelis. So any strengthening of the Terroristsâ„¢ since then is all Bush’s fault in the first place.
Should it bother anyone that the only excuse for continuing this bloody occupation is a ridiculous falsehood?
Here‘s where I wrote about it last year, and here‘s a great article by Tom Porteous on the same subject.
(praise/ridicule welcome over at Stress)