History, forgetting, and the Guardian

Tim Redmond in the Bay Guardian:

The invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with terrorism. The war in Afghanistan might at some point have been related, but it's not any more. The U.S. did the exact worst thing you can do in a military adventure: sent in troops with no way out.

So much obtuseness packed into three sentences! Osama Bin Laden was based in Afghanistan before 9/11, and most of the 9/11 hijackers were trained there.

And the dumb "exit strategy" argument formulated as "no way out," as if any of the wars the US fought in the last 200 years has had tidy "exit strategies" laid out beforehand.

The invasion of Iraq had everything to do with terrorism, since the only convincing argument for that war was the possibility that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Even the head of the CIA told President Bush that Iraq had WMD. An FBI agent asked Saddam Hussein why he didn't admit that Iraq had no WMD to avoid being invaded. Hussein answered that he didn't think his regime could have survived in that part of the world without the perception---especially by Iran---that Iraq had WMD.

The Guardian was AWOL as the Islamic fanatics tried, with considerable success, to intimidate the world's media in the wake of the Danish Mohammed cartoons. Why be an editor if you aren't willing to defend free speech?