US TROOPS ARE SITTING DUCKS
WHY WE NEED TO GET OUT OF IRAQ - NOW
By: Justin Raimondo
August 7, 2003 – A car pulls up in front of the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad, in the early morning hours: the occupants exit, and leave the scene. Not too long after, a huge explosion decimates the area: at least 10 people are killed, with as many as 40 wounded.
August 7, 1998 – A pick-up truck laden with explosives pulls up in front of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, at 10:38 a.m., and the detonation destroys the Embassy and kills hundreds. Almost simultaneously, the U.S. mission in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, is hit. The death toll is 224 persons: more than 5,000 are injured.
Coincidence? Not likely.
Those connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda we heard so much about in the period leading up to the invasion turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Osama bin Laden surely didn't have an Iraqi presence before the war, but he sure as heck does now.
In this ironic sense, then, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was perfectly correct the other day when he averred that "Iraq is the central battle in the war on terror." Seen from Osama bin Laden's perspective, it is. What Wolfowitz neglected to mention, however, is that the terrorists have gained a foothold in Iraq thanks to the U.S. – and that Bin Laden owes his victories to our own policies. On account of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, Al Qaeda not only has a ready-made pool of potential recruits at its disposal, but is being provided with plenty of American targets close at hand.
U.S. troops stationed in Iraq are sitting ducks for terrorists, easy pickings for suicide squads bent on wreaking as much deadly havoc as possible. The kind of war we are in was prefigured in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. Ronald Reagan's wise response was to withdraw. How long before George W. Bush stands at similar decision?
It was big news that, for two days, there were no reports of U.S. combat casualties, but this relatively long silence was punctuated by the Jordanian Embassy explosion, like a period at the end of a sentence. That, and a report of two more Americans killed, should dispel any illusions about what the U.S. is up against: the war, far from winding down, is rapidly escalating.
Having lured us into the dark heart of the Middle East, Osama bin Laden and his allies have U.S. soldiers right where they want them: surrounded by a hostile populace, on the defensive, and vulnerable to the low-intensity low-tech war of attrition now being waged against them.
It is an unwinnable war because it has no end point. There is no light at the end of this long, dark and perilous tunnel – and no good reason to crawl in there to begin with. At a certain point, the Bush administration will be faced with a stark choice: either continue to expose U.S. troops to continuous attacks in an area that is not defensible, taking casualties until public opinion at home rebels, or avoid all those needless deaths, not to mention the expense, and bring the troops home. As the casualties mount, the clock is ticking….
If Wolfowitz believes that Iraq is the central arena in the war on terrorism, then perhaps he hasn't heard the warnings about Al Qaeda preparing for another attack on the U.S. mainland. While the neocons in government and their amen corner in the media are hailing our alleged success in Iraq in bringing security to most of the country, the appalling lack of security in America's airports puts us all at serious risk.
Iraq has been "liberated" – but who will liberate us from the "Patriot" Act, and the further efforts of Attorney General John Ashcroft to increase the already expanded power of government agents to conduct secret searches and spy on American citizens? We will free the world – and enslave ourselves. It will be a fitting price to pay for our hubris.
The idea that we cannot withdraw from Iraq, that such a demand is impractical, immoral, irresponsible, or what-have-you, ought to effectively end the tiff over whether or not we have got ourselves involved in a "quagmire." We are in up to our ears. Yet there is still time to pull ourselves up, and out, before the disaster unfolds, and we ought to do so as fast as humanly possible.
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