Thursday, November 23, 2006

Played For a Fool, Part Deux

Last Friday I posted a story about an al-Qaeda double agent who spied for the British and the French governments. This fellow, in an interview with BBC, told how a prominent al-Qaeda leader captured by the Americans fed deliberately false information to Washington to lure the White House into doing al-Qaeda's bidding.

Here's Gwynne Dyer's take on this foolishness:

"Why Bush himself went along with it is an enduring mystery, and Maureen Dowd's hypothesis that it's really driven by Oedipal conflict ("Dad didn't take Baghdad, but I will") is as good as any. But the invasion would have happened without Libi's lies. It would even have happened without 9/11, if the neo-cons had got their way.

"The point is that al-Qaeda wanted to attack Saddam itself, but was happy to have the U.S. invade Iraq and overthrow him instead because it knew that in the long run it would benefit from the ensuing war of resistance against foreign occupation. I have been saying this all along, because I know a little about how Salafists think, and quite a lot about how terrorist strategies work. However, Nasiri's revelations are the first circumstantial evidence that al-Qaeda leaders actively tried to encourage the U.S. invasion.

"Every day that U.S. troops have been in Iraq since March 2003 has been a day when they served the purposes of al-Qaeda. Every day that they remain, they will continue to serve its purposes."

It's more than sad, it's pathetic.

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