A coworker said tonight
"After the Madrid attacks, Spain pulled out of Iraq, and there haven't been any attacks in Spain since then. You can see from this that the terrorists left Spain alone because they'd won that fight already. It emboldened them to try it again in London, to get the UK out of Iraq and Afghanistan."
I mulled this around for a while, and I realized something. Khobar Towers, the WTC bombing, and 9/11 were all, the terrorists said, because we had military bases in Saudi Arabia. Less then 2 years after 9/11, we pulled all our troops out of Saudi Arabia.
Did the terrorists win? More from the (admittedly old) article after the break...
Marking the end of an era, the United States will soon withdraw about 7,000 U.S. military personnel from Saudi Arabia and terminate a significant military presence there that lasted more than a decade, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced Tuesday.
Appearing at a press conference in Riyadh with Saudi Defense Minister Prince Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz, Rumsfeld said the Pentagon was ordering the redeployment, which involves mostly members of the U.S. Air Force, because there no longer is a threat from deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. The changes are to take place this summer.
The Persian Gulf, Rumsfeld said, "is now a safer region because of the change in Iraq." He also said U.S. planes no longer are needed to enforce a "no-fly" zone over Iraq. American military aircraft patrolling the southern half of Iraq did so in part from Saudi Arabia.
The U.S. also is likely to continue to use air bases in Iraq, increasing its military "footprint" in the region overall.
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Many Saudis resent the presence of U.S. forces in the nation that is home to Islam's two holiest sites, Mecca and Medina, and some--including Osama bin Laden--had used this as a justification for terrorism.
Replace Saudis with the entire Muslim world in that statement
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Tuesday's decision will help ease an increasingly uncomfortable situation for the U.S. and Saudi governments.
I'd call 17 out of 19 hijackers (if memory serves) being from Saudi Arabia, and 3000+ dead in NYC and DC an uncomfortable situation.
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After the war, about 4,000 uniformed Americans--mostly Air Force members--stayed in Saudi Arabia as part of the no-fly patrol operations, and as a check against further Iraqi offensives. However, they became a rallying point for Muslim fundamentalists, who charged the U.S. was trying to increase its influence over the Saudi royal family and the nation's oil reserves.
"The presence of the U.S. forces gives a lot of fuel to the virulent, anti-American Islamic forces that certainly command an audience in Saudi, and in the broader Arab world," said Jamil Khoury, an Arab specialist and business consultant who teaches at the University of Chicago. "It's become a real sore point in our relationship with the royal family, because it has become too burdensome to them.".
I guess it's good thing for the virulent anti-American Islamic forces that our occupation of Iraq gave them a picture of a Christian female leading a Muslim man on a leash to use for recruitment purposes, since we'd left Saudi Arabia.
For the U.S., the presence in Saudi Arabia was also yielding diminishing returns, even before the host country refused to participate in the second war against Iraq. U.S. personnel were under constant threat of terrorist attack after the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers apartment complex, which killed 19 service members.
So basically, we left Saudi Arabia because we were under constant threat of terrorist attacks there... sure wish we could use that basis to leave Iraq.
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Increasingly, the U.S. presence had become a central irritant for those pressing to reform the royal family's strong-armed rule and the fundamentalists who want to replace that government with a religious regime.
"As a society, it is overdue for fundamental political change," said Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, a Washington-area think tank. "And notwithstanding all the oil they're sitting on top of, we probably don't want to be there when that change occurs."
We left because we don't want to be around for the revolution, so we don't get in the way of the coming Muslim theocracy???
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Oh, and if you want to look back in time two years and see the fantasy world the hawks were living in during the Iraq invasion timeframe, and continue to live in, you can't beat the last few lines of the article. I miss Shinseki.
Leaving Saudi Arabia does not mean that U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf region will decline. The Iraq war was directed largely from U.S. Central Command headquarters, which had been established in Qatar. U.S. forces also used expanded bases and runways in Oman, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. A sizable U.S. force is expected to remain there while efforts to return order and establish a functioning government in Iraq are under way.
Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki has predicted that up to "several hundred thousand" U.S. troops may be needed to enforce the peace in postwar Iraq, though Rumsfeld's office has said that figure is high. More than 250,000 U.S. military personnel were in the region during the war, though many of those troops have begun to return home.
The U.S. is likely to keep using Iraqi air bases, analysts suggest, and those may be vital if the Bush administration intends to keep pressure on states that it has accused of supporting terrorism and that may now pose the next threat to U.S. interests in the region.
"If you're thinking about blowing up Syria or Iran, all those Iraqi bases are going to be far more useful than a base in Saudi Arabia would have been," said John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org. "I think the governments of Iran and Syria are going to be very nervous with a large American military presence on their borders."
Yeah, I bet the government of Iran is really sweating this out. You know, given the military cooperation agreement they've made with Iraq. Incidentally, that's something about which I can say "I told you so" to a Republican, and not even feel guilty about it. It's no surprise that a country with a Shiite majority would decide to work hand-in-hand with the Shiite country right next door.
So, back to my original topic, isn't it odd how we claim to be fighting terrorism, but our government keeps giving the terrorists what they want? Even when we kill them, we're making instant martyrs and the ones that survive believe the ones that die have died a noble death and are enjoying Paradise.