With enemies like this...


From the Financial Times of London:

"The Bush administration has misled the American people. It has isolated the US, as American diplomats and commanders pointed out this week. And its bungling in Iraq has given new and terrifying life to the cult of death sponsored by Osama bin Laden. Above all, it inspires little confidence it is capable of defeating the spreading al-Qaeda franchise, which always was the clear and present danger."
Link to the complete editorial:

FT.com Search Article

It is worth thinking hard about this now, with another American civilian killed in Saudi Arabia. Bush and Cheney, in duplicate red power ties, condemn the beheading as barbaric and evil. Killing of innocents should always be condemned, though it is not clear that tearing a person apart with bombs or ordnance is more barbaric than beheading, nor that unnecessarily sending the young and patriotic poor of America to be mangled in body and mind if not to their deaths by burning, being crushed to death, bleeding to death, or the hundred other ways humans die in machine-borne war, is any less evil.

It is worth thinking hard about the ramifications of the barbarity suffered upon Iraqis by war and in prisons. About the chaos, violence and suffering that results from starting an unnecessary war in a very dangerous place. Now the oil markets feel the pain of pipelines disrupted. And now Iraq harbors terrorists in numbers it did not before, with American-made video and photos for recruiting more, threatening now to steal oil wealth in Iraq and Saudi Arabia to finance terrorism of truly doomsday proportions.

In ways that are mythically, psychologically as well as politically predictable, Bush and Cheney have become the greatest allies al Qaeda and related terrorists ever had.