Fool Us Once…

The Bush Administration and the Republican noise machine are doing their dead level best to fool the public twice. Most galling in this effort is their attempt to use the very same arguments as before to push their war agenda. They are claiming that we cannot leave Iraq because al-Qaeda has established a stronghold making Iraq the central front of the war on terror. Yet this time the American public is not buying it. Cream-skimming and cherry-picking of intelligence for the sake of presidential prerogative is no longer allowed.

A new National Intelligence Estimate finds that al-Qaeda is not on the run and has not been smoked out. Instead, al-Qaeda has reestablished a safe haven on the Afghan-Pakistan border, reconstituted its top leadership, and is using Iraq as a subsidiary for recruiting and training.

President Bush’s Iraq strategy is strengthening al-Qaeda, not making us safer. In spite of the obvious consequences of our current strategy, President Bush and Republicans regularly point out the absence of new domestic attacks since September 11th as if to vindicate their present disastrous course. No attack today is no guarantee of its absence tomorrow.