How simple it looked to the faith-based visionaries three years ago
The Knight-Ridder news service has consistently done some of the best reporting on the Iraq War and the WMD fraud that was used to justify it. I hope the recent sale of a number of their newspapers doesn't negatively affect their national news coverage.
President Bush cited Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and ties to international terrorism - neither of which turned out to exist - when he ordered a pre-emptive war that began March 19, 2003. He predicted payoffs for the wider Middle East: spreading democracy, deterred enemies, more secure oil flows, a less hostile environment for Israel.
None of that has happened, at least not yet.
Instead, said officials and analysts in the United States, Arab countries, Israel and Europe, the invasion has produced a vortex of unintended consequences.
Militancy is on the rise. Terrorists are using Iraq as a training base and potential launch pad for attacks elsewhere, according to U.S. officials and documents. Democratic reform remains largely stymied. ...
"The region is pushed further toward extremism," said Mohamed el Sayed Said, the deputy director of the Cairo-based Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. "The Bush administration was warned that it's moving into an area of shifting sand. ... This is a very complex region with legacies of sectarian violence and religious strife."
The damage to the US armed forces is much more significant than we normally hear, certainly more than we'll ever hear from official administration spokespeople.
Strobel and Allam write:
The U.S. Army and Marine Corps, and especially the Reserves and National Guard, are feeling the strain of repeated deployments. Public support for the war is declining in America and almost nonexistent elsewhere. The war has cost more than 2,300 American lives, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates that its total financial cost may exceed $500 billion.
The All-Volunteer Force (AVF), arguably the most successful and widely hailed federal program of the past thirty years, is failing. The conditions that enabled the AVF to thrive through the 1980s and 1990s no longer pertain. The erosion of those conditions, greatly accelerated by the Iraq War, is exposing as false the great unspoken assumption undergirding U.S. policy since the end of the cold war, namely, that the United States can enjoy the prerogatives of being the world’s sole superpower on the cheap. ...
Four years into what the Bush administration describes as an open-ended war, evidence that the AVF has begun to unravel is now incontrovertible. The pipeline of new recruits is drying up. For four of the past five months, the Army—the service bearing the brunt of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan—has missed its recruiting goal. For May 2005, for example, the Army reduced its announced target from 8,050 to 6,700 recruits - and still fell 25 percent short. Figures for the Army Reserve and National Guard are equally dismal. For the Marine Corps, also heavily engaged in Iraq, the situation is only marginally better: through the first five months of 2005, Marine recruiters managed to meet their quota only once. Notably, these numbers are down although the Pentagon is easing enlistment standards, throwing more money into advertising, offering signing bonuses of up to $20,000, and pushing more recruiters into the field.
In one sense, the cause of the problem is self-evident: the ongoing insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Navy and the Air Force, services with a far smaller commitment to the active war zones, continue to meet their recruiting goals. For young people looking for a decent job and a leg up, becoming a sailor or an airman remains an attractive option.
Viewing service in the U.S. Army or U. S. Marine Corps in such terms no longer makes sense. To be sure, combat veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan continue to reenlist in large numbers, suggesting that those already in uniform find there challenge, camaraderie, and a sense of worth derived from being part of something much larger than self. But kids back on the block (and their parents) are taking a different view. Increasingly, they see military service not as a route to self-improvement but as a ticket to a war zone and a risk not worth taking. (my emphasis)
The shrinking number of defenders of Bush's "stay the course" policy in Iraq constantly talk about the danger of Iraq become a "failed state" like Afghanistan was (and still is, except in the pretty and fake world of administration propaganda).
But Strobel and Allam point out the our invasion and occupation has turned Iraq into a giant training camp for jihadists:
Counterterrorism experts and U.S. government documents seen by Knight Ridder say there are signs that terrorist-recruitment networks created to funnel foreign insurgents into Iraq are being "reversed," with battle-trained militants flowing out of the country to try to destabilize other nations.
In November, suicide bombers apparently under orders from Iraq-based terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi killed at least 60 people in coordinated attacks on luxury hotels in Jordan's capital, Amman.
Last month, would-be bombers were stopped during an attack on the world's largest oil-processing plant, in Saudi Arabia.
How much regional terrorism is due to the invasion itself is open to debate. Some experts say Iraq is beginning to resemble Afghanistan in the 1980s - a place for jihadists to rally and confront a superpower.
Afghanistan "was the ultimate extremist-networking opportunity. I think Iraq is serving that same purpose," said Paul Pillar, who retired last year as the U.S. intelligence community's top analyst on the Middle East and South Asia.
Y'all are doing a heckuva job, Bush, Rummy, Cheney, your whole crew!
