Skip the bait and switch

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http://dmregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040526/OPINION03/405260305/1035/OPINION

Instead of expressing a new realism about the situation in Iraq, what the president gave was more pie-in-the-sky about democracy emerging from chaos, along with more of the bait-and-switch thinking that got us into the mess in the first place.

It is bait-and-switch thinking when the president laces his speeches with frequent references to terrorists, portraying the invasion of Iraq as part of the wider war on terrorism. It's not, and it never was. How often does it need to be pointed out that pre-war Iraq had no role in the 9/11 attacks and no connection with the terrorists who carried them out?

It's ironic that the president chose the War College for his speech, because it was a visiting faculty member at the college who last winter wrote a much-discussed paper pointing out the invasion of Iraq was a detour from the war on terrorism.

In that paper, military scholar Jeffrey Record wrote that "the conflation of al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein's Iraq as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat" was "a strategic error of the first order. . . . The result has been an unnecessary preventive war of choice against . . . Iraq that has created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by . . . al-Qaida."

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1. and here comes Orange alert just in time

snip "in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by . . . al-Qaida."