The Real Enemy Staring Us in the Face

[acmavm]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/12/opinion/12HERB.html?th

By BOB HERBERT

Published: July 12, 2004

<snip>
Justin Hunt, a young man from Wildomar, Calif., about 75 miles east of Los Angeles, was determined to join the Marines. When recruiters pointed out that he was grossly overweight, he spent a year losing more than 150 pounds. Then he signed up and was promptly sent to Iraq, where he was killed last Tuesday in an explosion. He was 22.

Three American soldiers, not yet publicly identified, were killed yesterday in two separate attacks on military patrols north of Baghdad. On Saturday four marines were killed in a vehicle accident near Falluja. And five more American soldiers were killed Thursday in a mortar attack on a base in the Sunni-dominated city of Samarra.

For what?

<snip>
A government with even a nodding acquaintance with competence and good sense would have launched an all-out war against Al Qaeda, not Iraq, in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11. After all, it was Al Qaeda, not Iraq, that carried out the sneak attack on American soil that destroyed the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon and killed 3,000 people. You might think that would have been enough to provoke an all-out response from the U.S. Instead we saved our best shot for the demented and already checkmated dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein.

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