Has anyone else noticed this conflict between two of the supposed current goals of the Bush administration in Iraq?
On one hand, the US is supposedly intent upon creating a new democracy out of the ashes of the regime of Saddam Hussein.
On the other hand, Iraq is our “flypaper” for Islamic terrorists, where we are drawing them to fight in order to prevent them from attacking the US on its own soil.
But doesn’t it seem as if there’s a problem in setting up a stable nation in a war zone? I have a hard time reconciling those two plans. Unless the pool of potential terrorists in the Islamic world is just about empty (something I have a hard time swallowing) it seems like we’re going to need active flypaper for some time to come (making the huge assumption that it actually works) either in Iraq or elsewhere. And that means developing a stable government, turning over true power to that government, and leaving Iraq is a long way off (assuming, of course, that it was ever planned).