Al Qaeda Attacks Continue–Outside Iraq
I know we’ve all been really busy following the Don Imus and Anna Nicole Smith’s Baby Daddy stories, so I wanted to call this to everyone’s attention:
PARIS, April 11 — Two bombings in Algeria, one aimed at the main government building in the country’s capital, killed at least 23 people on Wednesday in a sharp escalation of the violence linked to Al Qaeda that has spread across North Africa.
Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, North Africa’s most active terrorist group, claimed responsibility for the attacks. It was the deadliest attack in the capital in more than a decade, and followed warnings by officials in Europe and the United States that Algeria was becoming a center for terrorism that could threaten Europe and North America.
If you haven’t looked at a world map recently, let me just say that Algeria is, like, really, really far from Iraq. So remind me again: why are we in Iraq?
The last remaining justification for our continued presence in Iraq seems to be that “If we fail in Iraq, the enemy will follow us home,” as if they were lost puppies. But if Al Qaeda is already planning and executing serious attacks outside of Iraq in places like Algeria, then clearly the notion that those who attacked America on Sept. 11 are “trapped” in Iraq is bogus.
They don’t need to follow us home. They know where we are, and whether we’re in Iraq or not, they’ll plan and execute another attack here in America, unless we root them out everywhere. And yeah, they will continue to fight us there, but that doesn’t mean we should use our troops and Iraqi civillians as bait for terrorists.
Look, if fly-paper worked, would anyone have bothered to invent DDT?