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Bush and his Terrorist Friends
So, for the first time since about a couple weeks after boots hit Afghan soil, all of my relatives who are or were in the military are back home. This led to some interesting discussion around July 4 when the family got together.
The officers were uniformly livid about how many times Bush and Co. talk about al-Qaeda; they are firmly convinced that we are turning local disputes into international ones and building up al-Qaeda; folks like al Sadr apparently have many times the resources of al Qaeda and are potentially much more dangerous, but because we've built up al-Q as the big guys we're afraid of, many smaller groups are driven to allign with al-Q because it helps with recruiting and gets them some more resources. Apparently the army avoids any mention of al-Q in Iraq, and the biggest difficulty is that Bush, Cheney, Condi and others posing for the American media market insist on talking about al-Q in their speaches and press releases.
They're also all convinced that al-Sadr will eventually govern in all or most of Iraq (even including Kurdistan), and that Bush knows this and just wants it to happen on someone else's watch, so right now they feel like they're just playing for time and potentially making the situation worse.
The discussion included relatively high ranking officers - mostly Democrats but there was no argument on these points from the one brother-in-law who is a vocal R or from the guy who's a registered independent and swing voter.
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