Newsweek re Is war in Iraq making us less safe from terrorism?

[Eric J in MN]

"Although the administration likes to say that the war in Iraq and the war on terror are inseparable, the former has almost certainly diverted resources from the latter. Arabic translators, always in short supply, are in demand to interrogate Iraqi prisoners and help American soldiers talk to the locals. Meanwhile, in Washington, transcripts of electronic intercepts of possible terrorist conversations pile up, unread and untranslated for weeks. Similarly, many Special Operations soldiers who had been chasing through the mountains of Afghanistan looking for bin Laden and his followers were shifted over to Iraq to spend months fruitlessly searching for weapons of mass destruction."

http://www.msnbc.com/news/997146.asp?0cl=c1

[fizzana]

1. Who would have figured this out?

Just the whole effing world except for the idiots actually making the decisions.

[calimary]

3. Don't forget the OTHER idiots - all those in deep denial and still

fervently believing in this hopeless charade. All those who still like bush and think he's doing an okay job.

[nickgutierrez]

2. Split between "Iraq war" and "War on Terrorism"

I like that the news media is starting to look at the Iraq adventure as being something totally seperate from the "War on Terrorism". If the conservative media (and I say that referring to the media as a whole) begins to view this war as a seperate venture, then maybe the public will as well.

[leesa]

4. Duh, ya think?

Do you think perhaps we should have behaved RATIONALLY after 9-11 and treated it like the criminal act it was, instead of the act of war it was not?? We probably would have had the perpetrators behind bars (even if it was Bush Co.) a year ago without 100s of dead soldiers and tens of thousands of dead Afghans and Iraqis.