Never give up, never surrender!

The folks over at the Weekly Standard are in full support Bush, support Rumsfeld, support the war mode. Today, they have three essays. One on how the torture at Abu Ghraib is just the work of a few bad eggs. Another on getting the job done right (by Kristol, of course). And one on the strategic wisdom of going into Iraq. This last essay was penned by Tom Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute. Get a load of this passage (emphasis added):

A president other than George Bush might have been content to invade only Afghanistan, but it's not clear that a more limited campaign would have saved us from our present troubles. There is no guarantee that our enemies in the region would have been content had our presence been limited to Kabul. Indeed, given the centrality of Afghanistan to the jihadist wing of Islam, it is almost certain that we would be facing tougher resistance there had we not gone on to Iraq. To have focused on Afghanistan and/or the ever-more-intricate global manhunt for Osama bin Laden would have been to relinquish the strategic initiative.

So, going full-bore after bin Laden and crushing al Qaeda in Afghanistan would not have seved us from our present troubles? Aren't pretty much all our troubles in Iraq?

And what's this notion that going into Iraq made the resistance less tough in Afghanistan? Is that some sort of endorsement of the "flypaper" scheme? That some jihadists left Afghanistan (making it easier for U.S. troops there) and decided to head for Iraq?

Boy, there are a lot of pretty amazing assertions being peddled these days by the neocons.

posted by Quiddity at 5/08/2004 08:04:00 AM