Follow-up analysis of the "throe away" insurgency post

The previous post explained that 1) the insurgency in Iraq is and always has been a homegrown phenomenon, meaning the insurgency does not consist primarily of foreign fighters; 2) the insurgency is driven by issues unique to Iraq, not global terrorism; 3) the Bush administration has been told of these matters since October 2003, and 4) the Bush administration has simply refused to accept these assessments because they do not comport with its views.

So what does all this mean? For starters, it means that most of the people we are fighting against are Iraqis, not members of Al Qaeda or other terrorists from outside Iraq. It means that the whole mantra of "We're fighting the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them here" is bogus. And that means that yet another of the Bush administration's major explanations as to why we went to and are still in Iraq crumbles under the weight of facts.

And another thing...the whole "We're fighting the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them here" meme is just bullshit. Assume for the moment that the Bush administration is correct in saying that we are primarily fighting foreign terrorists in Iraq. On April 30, 2005, I published a post about the Minuteman Project and Homeland Security in which I stated the following:

My previous post about the Minuteman Project pointed out that some of the participants have a concern over homeland security. And one of them, Tim Donnelly, asked "what the hell are we going to Iraq for?" Well, George his own self keeps saying over and over that "We're fighting the terrorists there so we don't have to fight them here." Bush's statement has some serious irony. See, since we have almost all of our military tied up in Iraq, and since we have spent and continue to spend billions upon billions of dollars because of Iraq, it's not so much a case of us not having to fight any terrorists here as not being able to do so. Moreover, there just might be plenty of terrorists in a country that is much closer to our borders than Iraq. More specifically, I am talking about a country much closer to our southern border.

That country is Venezuela, but that is another story.

Also, keep in mind that prior to the war, Iraq was NOT involved in 9-11 and Iraq did NOT have any meaningful ties to Al Qaeda. There is evidence that Iraq did have some ties to terrorists, but those terrorists were based in the Middle East and had Middle East objectives. In other words, they were no threat to America. What this means is that if indeed we are mostly fighting terrorists that pose a threat to the U.S. in Iraq, they did not get to Iraq until AFTER the war started. And now we are doing two things to aid those terrorists: 1) providing them with training they could not possibly get anywhere else, and 2) keeping our resources tied up in one area which means we cannot commit resources elsewhere (see paragraph from Minuteman post above).

Furthermore, the terrorists are under no obligation to stay in Iraq, whereas we are. If all the terrorists left Iraq tomorrow, we would still have to stay there, and we would still have to be pouring billions of dollars into the effort. The terrorists--fresh off their live combat training--could leave Iraq and then come to the U.S., or they could establish bases in places like Venezuela. And where would our military be? Iraq. Where would all the money needed to truly provide for Homeland Security be? Iraq.

And yet another thing...the war in Iraq has aided, not damaged, terrorism, as shown in the next post.