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we told you so.
Aug. 21st, 2003 09:11 amThe war on Iraq has been incredibly good fortune for al-Qaida.
Their hated enemy Saddam Hussein is out of power. This has opened the door for them to recruit and function in Iraq almost without check.
The zealots they recruit in Iraq do not have to even leave the country to have maximum impact against the US. There are already so many targets -- overworked, heatstressed, dehydrated American soldiers who, frustrated by sniping, too frequently shoot innocent civilians -- which aids their cause.
When al-Qaida targets water mains, power lines, or pipelines, they boost their own ranks by making the people of Iraq even more irate with the American occupation.
If the Pentagon sends more troops, which they almost certainly will, they can claim that the US is showing its true imperial colors.
When the US pulls out, whatever unstable government it leaves behind will almost certainly be overrun by right-wing Islamists.
Edit: For the present, the invasion has also provided good fortune for friends of the Administration. First Halliburton, now WorldCom:
Their hated enemy Saddam Hussein is out of power. This has opened the door for them to recruit and function in Iraq almost without check.
The zealots they recruit in Iraq do not have to even leave the country to have maximum impact against the US. There are already so many targets -- overworked, heatstressed, dehydrated American soldiers who, frustrated by sniping, too frequently shoot innocent civilians -- which aids their cause.
When al-Qaida targets water mains, power lines, or pipelines, they boost their own ranks by making the people of Iraq even more irate with the American occupation.
If the Pentagon sends more troops, which they almost certainly will, they can claim that the US is showing its true imperial colors.
When the US pulls out, whatever unstable government it leaves behind will almost certainly be overrun by right-wing Islamists.
Edit: For the present, the invasion has also provided good fortune for friends of the Administration. First Halliburton, now WorldCom:
WorldCom's MCI division never figured out how to build a cell network in the U.S., and ultimately gave up trying. But who needs experience when you have tasty political connections? Before 2000 WorldCom donated equally to Democrats and Republicans in order to land cell service contracts with U.S. occupation armies in Haiti, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Now it's leveraging a $45 million deal with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) into a Halliburtonesque sweetheart contract to build the first national mobile phone network in Iraq, where more than 2 million new customers are expected to sign up right away.
The Pentagon's rush to protect WorldCom from a scrappy Bahraini-based competitor, Batelco, which has built cell networks in the Middle East, has exposed yet another unholy alliance between corporate America and the Bush Administration. Demonstrating the brand of lightening-quick entrepreneurship traditionally treasured by free-market-loving Americans, Batelco raced into Iraq after the U.S. invasion and installed cell towers throughout Baghdad. ... But the CPA shut down Batelco and threatened to confiscate its $5 million of equipment. Now the CPA is now prohibiting companies more than 10 percent owned by foreign governments from bidding on civilian cell business in U.S.-occupied Iraq. That eliminates Batelco and most other Middle East-based telecommunications companies and, according to analyst Lars Godell of Forrester Research in Amsterdam, leaves MCI with "a head start."
From NO ETHICS? NO EXPERIENCE? NO PROBLEM!
