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01/26/2004 Archived Entry: "The Jihad on Iraq"

Posted by steve @ 01:50 PM EST [Link]

THE WAR IS BIGGER THAN JUST IRAQ: Michael Ledeen argues that we are too focused on Iraq, that we must realize that the real war is.

Bad analysis leads inevitably to bad policy, and our narrow focus on Iraq costs lives. Widespread terrorism and political demonstrations are not organized solely, or even primarily, by the shattered remnants of Saddam's Baathist regime, nor by the splintered pieces of al Qaeda. The war against us in Iraq and Afghanistan is an existential struggle guided, funded, and armed by tyrannical regimes in Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, because they are convinced — rightly enough — that if we succeed, they are doomed to fall in a regional democratic revolution. Their plan, modeled on the strategy that drove us out of Lebanon in the 1980s, was prepared long before we attacked.

They made no secret of their intentions. Prior to the liberation, Syrian President Bashar Assad publicly called for a "Lebanon strategy," and in August, the head of Hezbollah, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, called for the entire Muslim world to join in a jihad against Americans in Iraq. Throughout, Iranian leaders and Saudi clerics have denounced the American actions in Iraq and joined the call for jihad.

Read on.