August 27

The jihad all-stars
By MAUREEN DOWD


"We decided to conquer an Arab country and drive the Muslim fanatics
so crazy that they’d storm in, and then we’d kill them all? That’s the
latest Bush rationale for going into Iraq?"


WASHINGTON - Yep, we’ve got ’em right where we want ’em.

We’ve brought the fight to their turf, they’re swarming into Iraq and
blowing up our troops and other Westerners every day, and that’s just
where we want to be.

Our exhausted and frustrated soldiers are in a hideously difficult
environment they’re not familiar with, dealing with a culture America
only dimly understands, where our desperation for any intelligence has
reduced us to recruiting Saddam’s old spies, whom we didn’t trust in
the first place, and where we are so strapped that soldiers may have
to start serving back-to-back yearlong overseas tours.

We don’t know exactly which of our ghostly Arab enemies are which, how
many there are, who’s plotting with whom, what weapons they have, how
they’re getting into Iraq, where they’re hiding, or who’s financing
and organizing them.

And we certainly don’t understand the violent internecine religious
battles we’ve set in motion: At first the Shiites were with us, and
the Sunnis in the center of the country were giving us all the
trouble. Now a new generation of radical Shiites is rising up and
assassinating other Shiites aligned with us; they view us as the enemy
and our quest as a chance to establish an Islamist state, which Rummy
says won’t be tolerated.

In Tuesday’s macabre milestone, the number of US soldiers who have
died since the war now exceeds the number who died during the war.

But Republicans suggest that Iraq’s turning into a terrorist magnet
could be convenient -- one-stop shopping against terrorism. As Rush
Limbaugh observed, “We don’t have to go anywhere to find them! They’ve
fielded a Jihad All-Star team.”

The strutting, omniscient Bush administration would never address the
possibility that our seizure of Iraq has left us more vulnerable to
terrorists. So it is doing what it did during the war, when Centcom
briefings routinely began with the iteration: “Coalition forces are on
plan,” “We remain on plan,” “Our plan is working.”

Even though the Middle East has become a phantasmagoria of evil
spirits, and even though some Bush officials must be muttering to
themselves that they should have listened to the weenies at State and
nags at the CIA, Team Bush is sticking to its mantra that everything
is going according to plan.

As Condoleezza Rice put it on Monday, the war to defend the homeland
“must be fought on the offense.”

Speaking to the American Legion on Tuesday, Bush discreetly ignored
his administration’s chaotic occupation plan and declaimed, “No nation
can be neutral in the struggle between civilization and chaos.”

Echoing remarks by other officials, implying that it’s better to have
one big moment of truth and fight our enemies on their turf rather
than ours, Bush said: “Our military is confronting terrorists in Iraq
and Afghanistan and in other places so our people will not have to
confront terrorist violence in New York or St. Louis or Los Angeles.”

So that’s the latest rationale for going into Iraq? We wanted an
Armageddon with our enemies, so we decided to conquer an Arab country
and drive the Muslim fanatics so crazy with their jihad mentality that
they’d flip out and storm in, and then we’d kill them all?

Terrorism is not, as the President seems to suggest, a finite thing.

Asked at a recent Pentagon town hall meeting how he envisioned the end
state for the war on terror, Rumsfeld replied, “I guess the end state
in the shortest response would be to not be terrorized.”

By doing their high-risk, audacious sociological and political
makeover in Iraq, Bush officials and neocons hoped they could drain
the terrorist swamp in the long run. But in the short run, they have
created new terrorist-breeding swamps full of angry young Arabs who
see America the same way Muslims saw Westerners during the Crusades:
as Christian expansionist imperialists motivated by piety and greed.

Just because the unholy alliance of Saddam loyalists, foreign fighters
and Islamic terrorists has turned Iraq into a scary shooting gallery
for our troops doesn’t mean Americans at home are any safer. Since
when did terrorists see terror as an either-or proposition?

“Bring ’em on” sounded like a tinny, reckless boast the first time the
President said it. It doesn’t sound any better when Bush says it
louder with a chorus.