Iraq War Helps to Recruit Terrorists

This, from the WaPo, is a couple of weeks old, but I keep meaning to link to it.

I'm not a member of the "keep whining about the war and hope it ends in disaster" set. But I am one of the (many, many) folks who insisted that we not undertake the war without admitting to ourselves that (a) it would not hurt al Qaeda and (b) it would, in fact, help al Qaeda. Boy, I sure do hate being right so often...

Note that this does not constitute a decisive reason against going to war, but it does constitute a potent reason. Although I've advocated military action to eliminate Saddam since Gulf War Episode I, I also thought that this action should not be taken after 9/11 until we'd dealt with al Qaeda. Squash al Qaeda first, I thought, then take out Saddam on humanitarian grounds. The one thing we didn't want to do, I thought, was take out Saddam (and on false pretenses to boot!), leaving al Qaeda to (a) grow in power and (b) use our action in Iraq as a recruitment/training tool. That'd all be bass ackwards as we used to say back in the Show-Me State... Sadly, that's just what we did.