You either miss or ignore the point. There are "terrorists" in Iraq, in the sense of those that might otherwise ever attack US interests, but solely as result of the War. But if it was just them we were up against, things would have gone as well as the Administration predicted. For all practical purposes, we are up against the Sunnis, largely Iraqi military regulars that are following a planned sceme of melting away from the battlefieldl during the invasion and then using stored arms to mount an insurgency. They will make common cause with and employ "terrorsists" willing to detonante themselves to kill Americans, but only because that serves Sunni ends. The foreign fighters would be powerless against us if they didn't have local Sunni networks to plug into - they would have no haven and no ability to set IEDs etc, even if they could make them.
We are not really fighting terrorists in anay meaningful sense - we are fighting the remnants of the Republican Guard. Now I agree that one reason I do not want to pull out is because OBL and Co will claim credit for chasing us out, and will instantly be elevated in the eyes of the Muslim world as the man who used mujahedeen to run the Soviets out of Afghanistan and the Americans out of Iraq. But that's not close to the reality. It's also why this war was so foolish. OBL knew we would invade Afghanistan after 9/11 - said so in papers we seized and other intelligence. He relished the prospect, because he envisioned a return of the Afghan war of the 80s, his first claim to glory. The mountainous terrain of Afghanistan had proved the undoing of numerous great powers over the years. But the campaign there was brilliant, and our use of the Northern Alliance Warlords (which were his allies in the 80s and some of which allowed him to escape from Tora Bora), left him without the quagmire he sought. With them on board and the war largely against the Southern Pashtuns, there were few muntainous havens for large cadres of guerillas to hide out in and fight a guerilla war.
But the Iraqis were smarter. They learned 10 years earlier that it was a fool's errand to exchange firepower with us within the reach of airpower. So they melted in, hid arms, and decided to fight the war this way. And so now we have given OBL precisely what he sought - a seeming quagmire that looks impossible to escape from. Had we stopped after Afghanistan, the Islamic world would have been in awe of US power, as Reuel Marc Gerecht says. We would have routed the Taliban in months with little real casualties where the Soviets suffered greatly for years and left. But now we again look like we can be taken.
And unless we prove that we truly impose our will on Iraq, which right now looks impossible, we will have given Osama the victory he sought and our national interests will suffer, all because of the misjudgment of George W. Bush. This war, and it is his war, may prove to be a terrible blow to the US. It has already led to the loss of our moral laedership in the world and fractured the Western Alliance (which was squarely behind Afghanistan). Now it may end our ability to persuade a tyrant that we can remove him at an acceptable cost, a threat that would have loomed large had we stopped after Afghanistan. If that happens, this President should go down in ignominy as one who squandered a significant aspect of American power
If it isn't right to impose freedom on another country, what makes it right to impose a specific govt. or Constitution on them? How is doing that any different from old-fashioned colonization, which has been a complaint about this very war?
