Quote: (03-19-2019 01:25 AM)Bienvenuto Wrote:
Symbolic invasions?
[SNIP!]
The war in Iraq may have had symbolic value for the West but it had nothing to do with destroying Al-Qaeda. Saddam had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda. yet in the one of the first security meetings after 9/11 Bush kept insisting that Saddam was the biggest threat to the US at the time.
We had all kinds of fallout in the UK because the British MI6 lied and lied again with fictions about WMD to help the US craft the invasion narrative.
[SNIP!]
To begin with, consider "We had all kinds of fallout in the UK because the British MI6 lied and lied again with fictions about WMD" - but EVERY national intel agency believed Saddam did!
Even a buddy of mine whose Dad was a UN and then US nuke inspector in Iraq "to this day" believes Saddam did (he's retired now).
But in a historically unprecedented manner, only Saddam and certain family members knew there were none. The rest - even among Iraq's generals - believed Saddam had extensive WMD.
Belief is one thing; after 9/11, it all came down to what you could and couldn't prove. And the proof was in the fact that Saddam had this material before and didn't fully account for it as required by UN resolutions. Suspicions and his flagrant flouting of compliance implied his guilt and intent to keep it.
Now, consider your first point, "The war in Iraq may have had symbolic value for the West but it had nothing to do with destroying Al-Qaeda. Saddam had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda." Let's think backward.
With A. Q. Khan as nuke proliferation's linchpin, with enough money, Al Qaida could make its own WMD. And more recently, so could ISIS. Or else money could buy a work-around (eg, through Iran or the Norks) to get it.
Both terror groups have stated that they would use it against Infidel nations. (Cf, "The Al Qaida Reader" for textual confirmation for Al Qaida.)
Furthermore, when the US-led invasion of Afghanistan occurred, we heard that Al Qaida wanted to reverse engineer smallpox and to unleash that historic menace against the Infidel. (This too is documented in "The Al Qaida Reader.")
I did a course on the history of biotechnology at Harvard in 2005. The expectation then was that by about now, the Trump presidency, reverse genetic engineering the crucial bits of DNA to make smallpox would become possible.
And indeed CRISPR-Cas9 fast gene editing is now available and free to do so. Thus, on taking office, a group of biotech scientists and other emergent threat security experts prevailed on Trump to beef up the monitoring of this current new threat. The urban are and oil resources of ISIS no doubt played an important roll in Trump backing US-led efforts to take down ISIS.
I'm not happy about this. But Jihad is what the Muhammedan's live for.