As a psychological failure, Iraq probably isn't as bad for the US as Vietnam was. It's easy to forget just how troubled the 60's and 70's were in the United States. Iraq, for all of its frustrations and disasters, hasn't left the same scar on the American people.
Where Iraq has eclipsed Vietnam, however, is in terms of its aftermath. Yes, I'm talking about aftermath. It's over. Iraq is a failure, a genuinely earned defeat for the US and Britain. You can't screw up something that badly without working at it. This fiasco was no accident. There was nothing unforeseeable in it.
There were fears that the aftermath of Vietnam would be a "domino effect" that would see communist revolution sweep across Southeast Asia and beyond. That didn't happen. There was bloodshed but nothing on the scale we'd been warned would be inevitable.
The aftermath of Iraq, however, is already taking place and the Americans haven't even bailed out yet. There's a brand new generation of terrorists being minted in today's Iraq. I suppose they could fairly be called the "Bush Brigade" because they are the direct result of George Bush's idiotic invasion of Iraq. The bad guys are doing so well at churning out these fledgling terrorists that they've saturated the Iraqi market. As The New York Times reports, Iraq is now exporting terrorists:
"The Iraq war, which for years has drawn militants from around the world, is beginning to export fighters and the tactics they have honed in the insurgency to neighboring countries and beyond, according to American, European and Middle Eastern government officials and interviews with militant leaders in Lebanon, Jordan and London.
"Some of the fighters appear to be leaving as part of the waves of Iraqi refugees crossing borders that government officials acknowledge they struggle to control. But others are dispatched from Iraq for specific missions. In the Jordanian airport plot, the authorities said they believed that the bomb maker flew from Baghdad to prepare the explosives for Mr. Darsi.
"Estimating the number of fighters leaving Iraq is at least as difficult as it has been to count foreign militants joining the insurgency. But early signs of an exodus are clear, and officials in the United States and the Middle East say the potential for veterans of the insurgency to spread far beyond Iraq is significant.
"Militant leaders warn that the situation in Lebanon is indicative of the spread of fighters. “You have 50 fighters from Iraq in Lebanon now, but with good caution I can say there are a hundred times that many, 5,000 or higher, who are just waiting for the right moment to act,” Dr. Mohammad al-Massari, a Saudi dissident in Britain who runs the jihadist Internet forum, Tajdeed.net, said in an interview on Friday. 'The flow of fighters is already going back and forth, and the fight will be everywhere until the United States is willing to cease and desist.'
"There are signs of that traffic in and out of Iraq in other places.
"In Saudi Arabia last month, government officials said they had arrested 172 men who had plans to attack oil installations, public officials and military posts, and some of the men appeared to have trained in Iraq.
"Officials in Europe have said in interviews that they are trying to monitor small numbers of Muslim men who have returned home after traveling for short periods to Iraq, where they were likely to have fought alongside insurgents."
George Bush is fond of claiming that America is fighting terrorists in Iraq so that Americans won't have to fight them at home. This moron suggests that his military has these bad guys pinned down in Iraq. Sorry George but that's nonsense. Your adventure is now actually creating terrorists for the export market.
How are we going to stop these guys? I don't know. What I do know is that it's going to take a crop of leaders vastly better than the Bush, Blair, Howard and Harper gang that have created the current mess with their ideologically-bound incompetence.
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