Why Not Iraq?
Michael Costello gets it wrong, point by point. He claims the Iraq war only marginally increases Britain and Australia’s profile with the terrorists because the U.S. was under attack since 1983 and Australians were killed in Bali in 2002, prior to the Iraq invasion. These are valid points, if not precisely within the scope of the overall situation, but he then goes on to claim that the argument is that Iraq is “the cause of the terrorist threat.” No, that’s not what anyone’s saying. We’re saying going into Iraq has increased the scope of the problem. Where we were engaged in the destruction of al Qaeda in Afghanistan, we’re now engaged in an effort that has increased the recruiting power of that bloody organization. We’re not ignoring the messages from the terrorists, their claims of struggle against “crusaders,” we’re taking them very seriously, especially since we’re hearing more of this kind of rhetoric since going into Iraq. And nobody says we’d be “safe” if we’d stayed out, just that the situation might now be different, that we might be seeing few terrorist attacks instead of more and in places they weren’t previously happening, like London. This isn’t the Cold War, and Cold War comparisons don’t hold up, including deliberately misconstruing the argument over U.S. involvement with Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion there twenty years ago. It was the U.S. pull-out that allowed the Taliban to seize control and to make Afghanistan a haven for bin Laden’s training camps and planning operations, not support for the mujahideen, even though Osama was among them then. And there’s no head-in-the-sand argument here that ignoring the terrorists will make them go away, just an honest acknowledgement that the Iraq war is indeed “fostering a new generation of terrorists,” so the logical implication is just more dishonesty on Costello’s part. The only honest part of his editorial is the last paragraph, but making the rest of the argument against Iraq into nonsense is just “utter foolishness.” But what else can we expect from the Murdoch press?