My brother (at left) leaves tomorrow morning at 0300 for an undisclosed location in Afghanistan. He'll be there for up to 18 months fighting a newly invigorated Taliban and Al Qaeda.
President Bush claims that, “The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th, and that’s why what happens in Iraq matters to the security here at home.” Many critics disagree with the president's assertion.
As many of you know, I am a survivor of the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Now my brother is being sent to try to defeat those who perpetrated that attack, nearly 6 years later.
IMHO, this war in Afghanistan should be over my now, and my brother should be home with his family -- and the war in Iraq should never have happened.
As the New York Times put it on July 13, 2007 -- three days before my brother deployed to Afghanistan --
Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia did not exist before the Sept. 11 attacks. The Sunni group thrived as a magnet for recruiting and a force for violence largely because of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, which brought an American occupying force of more than 100,000 troops to the heart of the Middle East, and led to a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad.
Read the Times' appraisal of Bush's assertions in an article entitled "Bush Distorts Qaeda Links, Critics Assert" here, and more about the cost of the Iraq war in terms of the focus on Afghanistan here.
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