Bush has thrown open Pandora's box in a paradise for international terrori

[radfringe]

Bush has thrown open Pandora's box in a paradise for international terrorists
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1112026,00.html

2003 has been a crucial year for the Middle East, with war in Iraq and the continuing intifada in Israel. The Guardian's acclaimed commentator on the region assesses what happened, what it means, and where it might lead next year

David Hirst -- Tuesday December 23, 2003 -- The Guardian

This was the year the Middle East became the undisputed, tumultuous centre of global politics. When, at dawn on March 20 the US and its British ally went to war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, they were intervening in the region on such a scale that Arabs everywhere compared the invasion, in its potential geopolitical significance, to that seminal upheaval of the last century: the collapse of the Ottoman empire. That led to the arbitrary carve-up of its former Arab provinces by the European colonial powers and, in 1948, to the loss of one of them, Palestine, to the Israeli settler-state.

---snip---

"By pretending that Iraq was crawling with al-Qaida," the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd put it, "Bush officials created an Iraq crawling with al-Qaida." And not just Iraq: since the invasion the terrorists have struck in Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Turkey, mostly at the expense of other Muslims.

[nadinbrzezinski]

1. These are many of the

nightmare scenarios that slowly are coming to pass

Did the expects predict this? Yes

[aquart]

2. Experts, my ass. WE predicted this.

I predicted this.

A six-year-old could have predicted this.

[caledesi]

3. Yes, we DUers did. nt

[nadinbrzezinski]

4. To both we did

but most would not pay attention to us

Now we can join Anthony Cordessman (who seems to be as well
read as we are) in the I told you so

BTW the other war where experts were ignored by the genioses
in the WH was Nam... there is a pattern there... I think.

[leftchick]

5. Thank you for posting this radfringe....

It is a must read. Too bad the murkins will never see it, especially this.....

<By June the first American soldiers began to die. The resistance begun by Saddam loyalists widened to other groups, overwhelmingly Sunni, until by October the CIA concluded that 50,000 people were active in it. The US military responded with drastic methods - collective punishments, massive firepower, demolitions and razings - that could not but incite a greater militancy.

In the wider Arab world, a virulent anti-Americanism was not offset, as it was for the Iraqis, by a hatred of Saddam and the fear of his possible return. So it warmed to the Iraqi resistance more than most Iraqis did - and spawned militants of its own who were drawn to this new arena from which to conduct their jihad against the enemy of Islam and Arabism.

As they struck at almost any target, Iraqi, American or foreign, military, civilian or philanthropic, the itinerant suicide bombers also exploded another pretext for the war: that Saddam had been a partner with Osama bin Laden, and that overthrowing him would deal a critical blow to international terror.>

[Devils Advocate NZ]

6. So you mean America ISN'T safer now that Hussein has been captured?

Wow, who would have thought the General could get it wrong? Then again, he doesn't think the Osama Bin Laden linked KLA are terrorists, either...