“I think if you look at the last five years after the invasion of Afghanistan,” Reidel pointed out in a late-April interview printed in The Metro, “what you have to be struck by is the breadth and audacity of al- Qaeda and al-Qaeda-related operations. Al-Qaeda and its sympathizers have struck in Algiers, Casablanca, Madrid, London, in the west as far as Bali and in the east repeatedly at targets in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey — not to mention the civil wars that they have helped promote in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
In essence, what al-Qaeda and other Jihadists have helped promote, acquiesced by U.S. invasions of Iraq (and Afghanistan), is an anarchistic netherworld into which many more thousands of Afghans, Iraqis and likely many others, will soon be swept as a dire situation worsens.
“Osama bin Laden has said on many occasions that his objective on 9/11was to draw the U.S. into the Muslim world and then bog it down in quagmires,” Reidel explained. “His analogy has always been to what the Mujahedeen did to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. He sees where we are now in Iraq and Afghanistan as where he wants the American enemy to be: where he can gradually bleed us and wear down our resolve.”
Next
In August last year, an article appeared in the Washington Post titled What's Next in which Daniel L. Bynam and Kenneth M. Pollack suggested that along with many more thousands of civilian deaths, a full-blown Iraq civil war is likely to produce millions of additional Iraq refugees, setting up a series of events that could turn the Bushies' hopes of shotgun diplomacy as the means to a democratic end clearly on its head.
“The greatest threat that the United States would face from civil war in Iraq is from the spillover,” the authors wrote. “The burdens, the instability, the copycat secession attempts and even the follow-on wars that could emerge in neighboring countries. Welcome to the new "new Middle East," a region where civil wars could follow one after another.”
The concern with all this, the authors pointed out, is that often civil wars crossover into bordering territories and spiral into new conflicts that can last decades.
“..(T)he effects of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict, which began in the 1920s and continued even after formal hostilities ended in 1948, contributed to the 1956 and 1967 Arab-Israeli wars, provoked a civil war in Jordan in 1970-71 and then triggered the Lebanese civil war of 1975-90. In turn, the Lebanese conflict helped spark civil war in Syria in 1976-82. With an all-out civil war looming in Iraq,” they concluded, “Washington must decide how to deal with the most common and dangerous ways such conflicts spill across national boundaries.”
Though there is little reason to feel encouraged, it remains to be seen whether the Bushies have emerged from the irrationality of their post-911 thinking to address the current situation in Iraq along with a potential conflict with Iran using a fresh approach.
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