"War On Terror" = Series Of Jerry Springers, 1 Lunatic Leap After Another

[kpete]

Making Enemies
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek - July 26, 2006

Hamas and Hizbullah should not be confused with Al Qaeda. Bush's insistence on doing so shows his failure to understand his foes.

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.....................The American soldiers themselves were aware of how inane many of their night raids were. Back in January 2004, the unit I was with jokingly called their raids "Jerry Springers." Why? Because the intelligence was often based on unreliable sources who had agendas of their own. "Lots of times it turns out to be some guy who wants us to arrest another guy who's interested in the same girl," one soldier told me.

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The Bush administration has fought the "war on terror" as a series of Jerry Springers, one lunatic leap of logic after another based on unreliable sources, linking up enemies that had little to do with each other. The White House's failure to understand counterinsurgency in Iraq is, writ large, its failure to understand the radical Muslim enemy as a whole. The president has used Al Qaeda to gin up the threat from Iraq, just as he is now conflating Hizbullah and Hamas with Al Qaeda as "terrorists" of the same ilk. Actually these groups had little connection to one another—or at least they didn't until America decided to make itself their common enemy. Al Qaeda was always, in truth, the only "terrorist group of global reach" in the world—which is how Bush accurately defined things back in that long-ago fall of 2001. Both Hizbullah and Hamas had publicly disavowed any interest in backing Osama bin Laden's goals. Al Qaeda was Sunni, Hizbullah is Shiite. Even within the Muslim world these groups had scant support, although Hamas and Hizbullah had a lot more than Al Qaeda did because they were providing social services in Lebanon and Gaza.

more at:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14046789/site/newsweek/