Dismantling Bush's last reason for staying in Iraq

  Al-Qaeda has almost no influence on Iraq's affairs.  Bush is just as wrong today as he was three years ago.

Yesterday, President Bush said that al-Qaeda was responsible for most of the violence in Iraq.  But later that evening, NBC's Pentagon correspondent reported that al-Qaeda only makes up between two to three percent of all enemy fighters.  This adds validity to a Reuters report in September that analyzed how al-Qaeda only accounted for 5% of all Sunni Arab insurgents.

In other words, the violence has less to do with foreign fighters entering the country than it does with locals battling one another, and whose families have lived in Iraq for thousands of years.  Therefore, the Republican argument that we are fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq so we won't fight them here on our shores is a flawed one.  Al-Qaeda has a minimal presence in Iraq, if any.  They are in Afghanistan, where we have one-seventh the troop strength that we currently have in Iraq.  If you want to go after those that attacked us on 9/11, then you fight them in Afghanistan.  The civil war in Iraq is something that we are responsible for creating.  Why should we continue to waste money prolonging it?

Iraq never had anything to do with al-Qaeda, and still doesn't.  The only worry we should have with regard to the civil war in Iraq is its potential to spill over into the greater Middle East region.  Sending more U.S. troops into the country will not stop the political tension, and might cause terrorist militias to be more aggressive when implementing their violent tactics.  All that we can do is redeploy our troops to the periphery, let them fight it out, secure the borders with a multilateral force, help protect refugees, and hold a strategic summit with every Middle East country to prevent this chaos from spilling over and becoming a regional conflict.  Obviously that is just one idea.  We should be open to others as well.

But please, by all means, stop with this al-Qaeda-Iraq nonsense.  Bush knows that by putting the two together he can rhetorically manipulate some Americans into believing that sending more young Americans to die in Iraq is a smart idea.  And where are the Democrats on this?  They need to do a more effective job of challenging the Administration.

Bottom line: al-Qaeda is not Iraq, and Iraq is not al-Qaeda.  End of story.