Everybody and their brother — at least anyone who has any sense and isn’t on the payroll of the GOP — has been saying for years that our occupation of Iraq has nothing to do with fighting radical Islamists who want to commit mass casualty terrorist attacks in the US and around the world.
‘Nothing’ is a very big word. Clearly, there is a 
relationship. Indeed, I think there’s a pretty solid argument to be made that our invasion and occupation of Iraq has expanded the pool of terrorist recruits. And in other indirect ways with Iraq and international terrorism, we are all blind men touching different parts of the same elephant. But on the basic ground of ‘Is fighting in Iraq helping reduce the threat of terrorism at home?’ the answer is clearly ‘No’.
And yet, I wonder if this recent terror scare out of London may have actually driven that point home in a new and more resonant way.
Living in a major American city, I take it for granted that my wife and I live under a certain general threat of major terrorist attacks. In that sense I’m not really different from everyone else in the country to this or that degree. Back in late 2001, when I was living in DC and we were in the midst of the Anthrax scare and various reports of sleeper cells in the United States, I remember having moments where I hoped the FBI and CIA were doing everything imaginable to shut these guys down, whatever the constitution might say.
Now, here’s the point I want to focus in on. I want to make a basic distinction between the things we might think or feel impulsively when in the grip of fear and things we really think ought to be done. I never thought we should be torturing people or rounding people up. What I am saying is that I remember the atmosphere of those days just after 9/11 and the primal gut instincts that made part of me wish those things were happening.
It now seems that even this London bomb plot may not be all it’s cracked up to be. But it did give me a moment of that gut level fear. And in that moment, as much as I’ve thought what I’ve thought about Iraq, I’m not sure I ever felt as clearly how completely beside the point Iraq is from the real threat we face of deracinated Islamic radicals (in the Muslim world and sprinkled about the West) trying to perpetrate mass terror attacks.
It hit me like a sort of epiphany even though it was a realization of something I and countless others have been saying for years.
I’m curious to know whether anyone else experienced something similar and even more whether anyone else’s mind (about Iraq) actually may have been changed.
Is there anyone in the country who can say honestly, in their heart of hearts, that when that moment of fear hit them after the recent reports out of London, they said to themselves, “God, I’m glad we’re in Iraq”?
Anyone?
