They Won't Follow Us Home

As President Bush desperately grabs at straws in an attempt to bolster support for his promised veto of forthcoming emergency funding bills for the military in Iraq, he has returned with greater regularity to a sad and disillusioned bit of fear-mongering that has long been a hallmark of Iraq war supporters.

In a speech on Monday Mr. Bush repeatedly claimed that if the American military did not continue to fight insurgents in Iraq, the insurgents would come to America and bring violence with them. Among his other outrageous contentions Mr. Bush said:

• fight the extremists and radicals where they live, so we don't have to face them where we live.
  
• The consequences of failure in Iraq would be death and destruction in the Middle East and here in America.
• enemies that could just as easily come here to kill us.
• If we do not defeat the terrorists and extremists in Iraq, they won't leave us alone -- they will follow us to the United States of America.

This was not the first time that Mr. Bush has levied these ridiculous threats in his attempts to berate the American Public into supporting his misguided invasion of Iraq. As Dan Froomkin pointed out Mr. Bush has relied on this fear-mongering construction since the earliest days of the war and continues to use it regularly.

Not only are the fear mongering tactics of Mr. Bush and his allies crass and manipulative, they are at least deceitful and according to experts most likely to be patently untrue. That Mr. Bush should be so far removed from the truth of the situation in Iraq and the Middle East at large should, by this point, come as no surprise. For four years Mr. Bush has failed to accurately depict the situation in Iraq or predict the course that the war would follow, he is wrong again.

Experts agree that Mr. Bush's claims of Iraqi insurgents following American soldiers from Iraq to the streets of the United States are extremely unlikely to come true.

• In an interview on NPR Bruce Hoffman, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University, cited the increasingly lower numbers of foreign fighters among the insurgency in general and within al Qeada in Iraq in particular.
• In a report for McClatchy Newspapers William Douglas quotes both conservative and liberal experts who dispute Mr. Bush's claims:
  
  • “The president is using a primitive, inarticulate argument that leaves him open to criticism and caricature,” said James Jay Carafano, a homeland security and counterterrorism expert for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy organization. “It’s a poor choice of words that doesn’t convey the essence of the problem - that walking away from a problem doesn’t solve anything.”

  • Daniel Benjamin, the director of the Center on the United States and Europe at The Brookings Institution, a center-left think tank, agreed.

    “There are very few foreign fighters who are going to be leaving the area because they don’t have the skills or languages that would give them access to the United States,” said Benjamin, who served as the National Security Council’s director for transnational threats from 1998 to 1999. “I’m not saying events in Iraq aren’t going to embolden jihadists. But I think the president’s formulations call for a leap of faith.”

  Mr. Douglas's report also mentions the low percentage of foreign fighters in the Iraqi insurgency:

  Foreign-born jihadists are present in Iraq, but they're believed to number only between 4 percent and 10 percent of the estimated 30,000 insurgent fighters - 1,200 to 3,000 terrorists - according to the Defense Intelligence Agency and a recent study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a center-right research center.

  Mr. Douglas further quotes an anonymous American Intelligence official who says:

  The war in Iraq isn't preventing terrorist attacks on America,If anything, that - along with the way we've been treating terrorist suspects - may be inspiring more Muslims to think of us as the enemy.

• Writing for the Washington Post Walter Pincus and Karen DeYoung refer to a multitude of terrorism experts both within and without the Bush Administration who say that Mr. Bush is incorrect in asserting that Iraqi insurgents will "follow us home."

  Attacking the United States clearly remains on bin Laden's agenda. But the likelihood that such an attack would be launched from Iraq, many experts contend, has sharply diminished over the past year as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) has undergone dramatic changes. Once believed to include thousands of "foreign fighters," it is now an overwhelmingly Iraqi organization whose aims are likely to remain focused on the struggle against the Shiite majority in Iraq, U.S. intelligence officials said.

  Mr. Pincus and Ms. DeYoung also quote Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell who when asked during congressional testimony if "al-Qaeda-type elements" might pursue American Soldiers as they withdrew from Iraq responded simply; "Unlikely."

Despite the fact that his major talking point fails to have a basis in fact let alone reality Mr. Bush has announced his intention to continue threating Americans with his dire, yet false, claims that pulling out of Iraq (and thereby reducing American casualties) will result in terrorists following soldiers to their homes in the United States. Thankfully the American public appears to no longer be interested in what Mr. Bush has to say.

It is important to remember that prior to the American invasion of Iraq there were no terrorists operating there and the conditions for an Afghanistan type safe-haven for terrorists did not exist. Mr. Bush and his war supporters created the situation in Iraq they did so disingenuously and via a reliance on falsified information.

Now, with the continued aiding and abetting of a complicit national media Mr. Bush is attempting to prolong his mistake by once again lying to the American public to their great detriment.