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"A senior U.S. intelligence official in Washington said Iraq has emerged as the focal point for Islamic jihad, becoming the most active front in the movement and the top priority for Muslim fighters who want to confront the United States," reports the Los Angeles Times (reg. req.).
"The assessment, shared by analysts at the CIA and other agencies, underscores how in a matter of months Iraq has supplanted Afghanistan, Chechnya and other international trouble spots as the focus of the jihad cause...As many as 2,000 Muslim fighters from as far as Sudan, Algeria and Afghanistan are operating in Iraq...The largest group of militants is from neighboring Syria, officials say, while others have come from Jordan, Egypt, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Palestinian territories."
It would be stating the obvious to say this is such grim news. But the fact that the US has created a new locus for Islamist jihad in a place that by and large did not have it, all the while claiming that toppling Saddam Hussein was central to the war on terror, is stunning beyond belief. What would be the equivalent? Toppling a leftist leader in a Latin American country after which a serious Communist insurgency develops?
More on this later. But the most disturbing aspect of this story remains the continued refusal of the hawks who championed the war on the grounds that Saddam Hussein was supposedly aiding and abetting Al Qaeda and was an imminent WMD threat -- to face the facts; and that they continue to lie and dissemble and mythologize what the US mission in Iraq is accomplishing, or failing to accomplish. The reality is so drastically different from what they portray, listening to their continued "Iraq war as Bush/Cheney '04 campaign" is like witnessing a kind of insanity.