Iraq, London & America's Homeland Insecurity

Ever since the media began admitting what we all knew was true – that the Bush administration lied about why we were going to war in Iraq – the White House has tried to repackage our Iraq operations as a way to prevent terrorism here at home. As President Bush said in October, "We are fighting these terrorists with our military in Afghanistan and Iraq and beyond so we do not have to face them in the streets of our own cities." Tragically, the terrible bombing in London shows we are now paying a horrible price for this silly, dangerous, short-sighted, and truly dishonest line of reasoning.

The idea that, because our troops are in Iraq, terrorists will only attack us there and not "in the streets of our own cities" is, first and foremost, an insult to our troops because it treats them as if their entire mission is to serve as bait for terrorists. That's not what our troops – or America – was told this was all about.

Secondly, are we really supposed to believe the same terrorists who masterminded the 9/11 attack can't walk and chew gum at the same time? I mean, maybe George W. Bush and the dolts around him are so intellectually impaired they can't do two things at once – but Al Qaeda sure can, and any sentiment to the contrary is idiotic.

But the fact that this line of reasoning insults our intelligence shouldn't be the biggest concern with it. The fact that this rationale has justified spending billions on a war in Iraq while shortchanging basic homeland security is what's really troubling. For years now, experts have begged the Bush administration to adequately fund key homeland security priorities - but they have been rejected at almost every turn.

Instea, the White House has knowingly left our ports, our borders and yes – our transit systems – totally vulnerable to terrorist attacks because they have refused to spend adequate resources, even as they have insisted on cutting taxes for the wealthy and plunging us into a war in Iraq. When Democrats have tried to reduce those tax cuts to pay for critical homeland security needs, they have been voted down. Meanwhile, GOP leaders in Congress have gone along: for instance, just a few weeks ago they gutted funding for transit security.

You can argue that London may not technically be "our own" city. But our special relationship with England means that, for a discussion of national security, it is for all intents and purposes.

And that's why today's tragic bombing frighteningly highlights just how misguided our entire national security strategy really is. First our government lied to us about why we were going to war in the first place. Then, when that dishonesty was exposed, we got fed another steaming pile of crap about how the war in Iraq was protecting us from terrorists because it was diverting terrorists' attention.

It is now painfully clear that those rationales were not designed to level with the American people – they were designed with one thing in mind: scaring us into supporting what should have been an unsupportable war, at the very time when we should have been focused on and scared about a far more serious challenge: securing the homeland after the worst terrorist attack in American history.

COMMENTS: Go to Sirota's Working Assets site to comment on this entry