The White House has of course been repeatedly whapped for its prewar insinuations about AQ purported tightness with Saddam.
Maybe I'm months late to this, but what strikes me no is the White House's continued insistence that fighting in Iraq and the war on terror (aka Global War on Terror, or GWOT) are the same thing.
They are related, of course. But not in the way the White House claims. More in the way Chechnya is. That is: 1) There are some global jihadists probably fighting there 2) They are mostly domestic, nationalist insurgencies 3) They're both big blinking recruiting posters for Muslim rage.
That is, Iraq is not the same thing as the war on terror. It's ancillary. And by the way, I think the terms we use are helping the administration to get away with it. After all what is the 'War on Terror" but a helpfully loosey-goosey (politically constructed) term that really stands for a war on al-Qaida or more broadly the global jihadist movement?
No one who is not a Bush administration official should use the term "War on Terror" for exactly the reason you state.
Bush & Co. call it the "War on Terror" precisely so they can make it all one big conflict of which we're obviously on the right side. (Who's against fighting terror?)
Posted by: Kenneth Fair | September 17, 2004 at 05:51 PM