“Some are now attacking the president for attacking the terrorists.”
Is that how it is?
That’s the line from a Republican party ad about to go on air in the primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire.
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth we have a batch of unsettling news from the real war on terrorism.
In Turkey, the jewel of the democratic, western-oriented muslim Middle East, two more horrific suicide bombings kill 27 and wound hundreds.
As Craig Smith notes perceptively in the Times: “The attacks appeared aimed at disrupting the pro-Western secular axis many people in the Middle East believe the United States and Britain are trying to drive through the region with Iraq war. Such an axis would create a swath of territory friendly to the West from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf.”
A five-member UN panel says it is “just a matter of time” before al Qaida attempts a chemical or biological attack.
And the Washington Post reports on an ominous process of what we might term ‘alqaidogenesis’ …
Leaders of the al Qaeda terrorist network have franchised their organization’s brand of synchronized, devastating violence to homegrown terrorist groups across the world, posing a formidable new challenge to counterterrorism forces, according to intelligence analysts and experts in the United States, Europe and the Arab world.
The recent attacks in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Chechnya and Iraq show that the smaller organizations, most of whose leaders were trained in al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, have fanned out, imbued with radical ideology and the means to create or revitalize local terrorist groups. They also are expanding the horizons of groups that had focused on regional issues.
It is, it would seem, a process which is proceeding a pace with little connection, for a good or for ill, to anything we are accomplishing or not accomplishing in Iraq.
