GOP STRATEGY: Conflating 9/11 and Iraq
guest post by foreign policy expert Chuck Pena
(Stewart video and NYTimes quote added by TM)
| Jon Stewart nails Terror Guy. (It's must see Daily Show TV.) |
THE PRESIDENT: What did Iraq have to do with what?
Question: The attack on the World Trade Center?
THE PRESIDENT: Nothing…
Last week,
I wrote about how some of the top brass in the military were using low combat readiness (due to an inability to repair or replace equipment fast enough) as a reason
for some of the problems the U.S. military is having in Iraq. But readiness
is just a red herring for the larger manpower problem brought on by the Iraq
occupation. Well yesterday, the U.S. Marines Corps confirmed that the problem
is manpower and not equipment by announcing the involuntary recall of up to
2,500 Marines at a time for combat duty in Iraq and Afghanistan (but there is
no cap on the total number that can forced back into service). According to
U.S. Marine Colonel Guy A. Stratton, head of the manpower mobilization
section, the Marines are short about 1,200 troops for upcoming deployments.
And Colonel Stratton intimated that the involuntary recall is not just a short
term fix because the decision was predicated on the belief that “this is
going to be a long war.” How long is that? According to President Bush,
“We're not leaving, so long as I'm the President.” But the longer
we stay in Iraq, the more the military — in particular the Army and Marine
Corps — will be worn down and potentially worn out. And all for naught since
Iraq was never a military threat to the United States and neither was it a terrorist
threat, al Qaeda or otherwise. Indeed, when asked at a news conference on Monday
what
Iraq had to do with the attack on the World Trade Center, the president
replied, “Nothing.”
Americans increasingly see the war in Iraq as distinct from the fight against terrorism, and nearly half believe President Bush has focused too much on Iraq to the exclusion of other threats, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
The finding that 51 percent of those surveyed see no link between the war in Iraq and the broader antiterror effort was a jump of 10 percentage points since June. It came despite the regular insistence of Mr. Bush and Congressional Republicans that the two are intertwined and should be seen as complementary elements of an overall strategy to prevent domestic terror attacks.
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