Among Richard Clarke’s most pertinent comments concerning the “war on terror” today are his observations on the war in Iraq–a war he opposes. He recently appeared on Larry King Live and offered three reasons why the Iraq invasion was a setback in the “war on terror”:
Number one, it diverts us from reducing the vulnerabilities here at home, like protecting the rails from attacks like the one on Madrid. We’re spending $180 billion in Iraq. We should be spending that money reducing our vulnerabilities to terrorism here at home, much more than we are. The railroads, the chemical plants, they are all still unprotected.
The second way it reduces the war on terrorism is by inflaming the Islamic world and helping, as Rumsfeld said in his internal memo, helping create more terrorists more rapidly than we can capture or kill them, because of the hatred in the Islamic world generated against the United States by our needless invasion of Iraq.
And the third way, of course, was it actually took troops and intelligence assets away from the hunt for bin Laden. We’ll probably catch bin Laden here shortly, but it’s two years too late. In those two years, al Qaeda has morphed into a hydra, a multi-headed organization, so that by the time we catch him now, it won’t matter very much, because all of these al Qaeda-like organizations have grown up around the world, like the group that attacked in Madrid.
The point is, the war in Iraq was not necessary. Iraq was not an imminent threat to the United States. And by going to war with Iraq, we have greatly reduced our possibility to prosecute the war on terrorism.
This, in the simplest terms, is the case against our attack on Iraq. Well said.