It's al-Qaeda, All the Way Down

I went to the dry cleaners this week, and some al-Qaeda laundry worker lost a button off my shirt.  Then the al-Qaeda gas station had the prices back up to $3, and my al-Qaeda molar started to hurt, and I had to visit the al-Qaeda dentist.  So I really just had an al-Qaeda of a day.

You think I'm overusing that term?  Obviously, Bush does not agree.

In rebuffing calls to bring troops home from Iraq, President Bush on Thursday employed a stark and ominous defense. "The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq," he said, "were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th, and that's why what happens in Iraq matters to the security here at home."

...

On Thursday alone, he referred at least 30 times to Al Qaeda or its presence in Iraq.

Naturally, the people in Iraq are not the same people who attacked us.  First of all, in the most literal sense, those folks are kind of... dead.  But even if you apply the term more broadly, few if any of the fighters in Iraq have any relationship to the al-Qaeda that helped fund and organize the attacks in the US.

In fact, in this case, the situation is reversed.  The US helped to fund and organize the people we are calling al-Qaeda.

Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia did not exist before the Sept. 11 attacks. The Sunni group thrived as a magnet for recruiting and a force for violence largely because of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, which brought an American occupying force of more than 100,000 troops to the heart of the Middle East, and led to a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad.

That's not stopping the administration.  Four years into post-justification, every day is al-Qaeda day.  More unfortunate is the fact that the media has played along with this.  With clockwork regularity, every sort of violence in Iraq is uncritically attributed to al-Qaeda.  It's about as helpful as if the evening news  decided to proclaim every murder the work of O. J. Simpson (actually, that might be more accurate).

Besides the historical revisionist approach to justifying the war, there's another reason the Bush administration insists on sewing the al-Qaeda label onto every bad event: if we have to fight them over there to keep from fighting them over here, it helps if we're actually fighting them.  But because we're not actually fighting al-Qaeda -- the real al-Qaeda, the actual organization has freedom to build, expand, and...

"The president wants to play on Al Qaeda because he thinks Americans understand the threat Al Qaeda poses," said Bruce Riedel, an expert at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy and a former C.I.A. official. "But I don’t think he demonstrates that fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq precludes Al Qaeda from attacking America here tomorrow. Al Qaeda, both in Iraq and globally, thrives on the American occupation."