President Bush, trying to defend his war strategy, declassified intelligence Tuesday asserting that Osama bin Laden ordered a top lieutenant in early 2005 to form a terrorist cell that would conduct attacks outside Iraq — and that the United States should be the top target.
The information mirrored a classified bulletin from the Homeland Security Department in March 2005, reporting that bin Laden had enlisted Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, his senior operative in Iraq, to plan potential strikes in the U.S. The warning was described at the time as credible but not specific and did not prompt the administration to raise its national terror alert level.
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Bush, who is battling Democrats in Congress over spending for the unpopular war in Iraq, will argue that the terrorist threat to America is real, said Frances Fragos Townsend, the White House homeland security adviser. She said Bush would talk about why Iraq is an important battleground in fighting terrorism abroad to prevent attacks on U.S. soil and highlight previously reported successes in foiling terrorist attacks.
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Townsend, reading from notes, said the declassified intelligence showed that in January 2005, bin Laden tasked al-Zarqawi with organizing the cell. Al-Zarqawi, the former leader of al-Qaida's Iraq operations, was killed there in June 2006 by a U.S. airstrike.
"We know from the intelligence community that al-Zarqawi welcomed the tasking and claimed he already had some good proposals," Townsend said.
She said that in the spring of 2005, bin Laden instructed Hamza Rabia, a senior operative, to brief al-Zarqawi on al-Qaida planning to attack sites outside Iraq, including the United States. She did not disclose where in the United States those attacks were being plotted.
I'm guessing that the release of this information is part of "why Iraq is an important battleground in fighting terrorism abroad to prevent attacks on U.S. soil." Only this seems to show that the "we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here" 'strategy' has absolutely no basis in reality: the people we're fighting can, in fact, target the United States while they're fighting in Iraq. As former White House counterterrorism director Richard Clarke put it:
Of course, nothing about our being "over there" in any way prevents terrorists from coming here. Quite the opposite, the evidence is overwhelming that our presence provides motivation for people throughout the Arab world to become anti-American terrorists.
Or perhaps this has been declassified so Bush can tout it as one of those "previously reported successes in foiling terrorist attacks"? But given that the administration didn't consider it a serious enough attack to raise the terror alert level, it would be disingenuous to tell us how narrowly we avoided death thanks to Bush's brilliant decision to invade a country that had nothing to do with al-Qaida before we made it a breeding grounds for terrorists. Of course, that's never stopped Bush before....
Besides, Ms. Townsend, no-one has denied that "the terrorist threat to America is real." We simply feel that continuing to divert our resources to a civil war that doesn't seem to be resolvable (at least not by military forces), not to mention our decision to invade Iraq in the first place, isn't the best way to face this threat. Consider more of what Mr. Clarke had to say:
[I]nvesting time, energy and resources in Iraq takes our eye off two far more urgent tasks at hand: one, guarding the homeland against terrorism much better than the pork-dispensing Department of Homeland Security currently does the job; and two, systematically dismantling Al Qaeda all over the world, from Canada to Asia to Africa. On both these fronts, the Bush administration's focus is sorely lacking.
Yet in the fantasyland of illogic in which the President dwells, shaped by slogans devised by spin doctors, America can "win" in Iraq. Then, we are to believe, the terrorists will be so demoralized that they will recant their beliefs and cease their terrorist ways.
In the real world, by choosing unnecessarily to go into Iraq, Bush not only diverted efforts from delivering a death blow to Al Qaeda, he gave that movement both a second chance and the best recruiting tool possible.
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