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Thread 9747

Thread ID: 9747 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2003-09-12

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na Gaeil is gile [OP]

2003-09-12 16:18 | User Profile

**IRAQ IS THE 'FLYTRAP' – and U.S. troops are the bait. by Justin Raimondo

The complete moral bankruptcy of the War Party is coming out of the closet, as they say, with the emergence of the strategic thinking behind the war in Iraq. To those Americans who see that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, no weapons of mass destruction, no imminent danger, the war is a mystery. As American casualties become a daily routine, and Iraq slips into chaos, more and more Americans want to know: What were they thinking?

Ah, but Andrew Sullivan knows…..

In the confidential manner of a practiced sycophant, the British-born writer, former editor of The New Republic, and George Orwell wannabe, is so eager to show off his chumminess with the powerful that he lets slip the following:

"Some time before the Iraq war, I found myself musing out loud to someone close to the inner circles of the Bush administration. We were talking about the post-war scenario, something that even then was a source of some worry even to gung-ho hawks like myself. …I voiced some worries about what might happen if an occupied Iraq became a target for international terrorism. Wouldn't U.S. soldiers become sitting ducks? What was to stop al Qaeda using Iraq as a battleground in the war against the West? …

"And what he said surprised me. If the terrorists leave us alone in Iraq, fine, he said. But if they come and get us, even better. Far more advantageous to fight terror using trained soldiers in Iraq than trying to defend civilians in New York or London. 'Think of it as a flytrap,' he ventured. Iraq would not simply be a test-case for Muslim democracy; it would be the first stage in a real and aggressive war against the terrorists and their sponsors in Riyadh and Damascus and Tehran. Operation Flytrap had been born."

... **

[url=http://www.antiwar.com/justin/justincol.html]full text[/url]

Raimondo goes on to describe this as a "profoundly evil scheme" but frankly I couldn't imagine a more profoundly stupid scheme. “Far more advantageous to fight terror using trained soldiers in Iraq than trying to defend civilians in New York or London”? Soldiers aren’t trained to fight terrorism, intelligence agencies are trained to fight terrorism. Soldiers are trained to fight other soldiers in conventional military situations. Every second rate military and first rate political thinker has recognised the futility of regular military units versus guerrilla forces, but oh no, not the neo-cons.

Neo-cons are first rate hucksters but in all other senses children; evil, malignant children but children none the less. The echoing vacuousness of their thinking is almost deafening