FURTHER UPDATE: The latest US intelligence shows that Al Qaeda's leadership is in Pakistan, and it's growing stronger. Osama is in Pakistan. What the hell are we still doing in Iraq while Bush refuses to take out Al Qaeda's leadership in Pakistsan? It is a flat-out insult to our troops, lying to them about why they're being asked to risk their lives.
UPDATE: Now he's claiming that anyone who wants us to withdraw from Iraq is doing so because they don't believe Al Qaeda is even IN Iraq. False. Everyone knows that Al Qaeda is NOW in Iraq, since Bush basically invited them in, but we don't believe - the experts in Bush's own administration don't believe - that Al Qaeda is "the PRINCIPAL threat" in Iraq because it is not. This is a civil war. Second, they don't believe that you are capable of winning this war because you're an arrogant, obstinate, blithering idiot who refuses to change the course. More of our troops are going to die needlessly because their commander in chief is an idiot.
Anyone who claims that the so-called al Qaeda in Iraq group is the "principal threat" to anything in that nation -- whether its citizens, the government, the political process, or any specific ethnic or sectarian group -- is either grossly ignorant of the realities of the Iraq war or blatantly lying. I honestly have no idea which it is in this case, though it's worth noting that the chief U.S. military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, was employed as a Special Assistant to the President prior to his current appointment.
Most reliable estimates put the fundamentalist/jihadist/al Qaeda actors in Iraq at around 3-5% of the total insurgency, with virtually no approximations exceeding 10%. I really cannot overstate how misleading it is to focus on al Qaeda when the driving forces of the conflict are average, native, very pissed-off -- but not religious fundamentalist -- Iraqis. The vast majority of the Sunni population is relatively secular (more secular, in fact, than Iraqi Shia), and even tacit support of jihadists is founded in anti-American sentiment. Even the sectarian violence is fueled more by localized conflicts between Sunni and Shia families, tribes, and militias than by al Qaeda
It's not debatable, the man is lying, and our own intelligence agencies have told him so. Yet he keeps doing it. He in on his own personal God-anointed Christian crusade against the "evil Muslims." And he wonders why they hate us.
