IRAQ

Bushwarblog: Trouble in the Hinterlands
Now we begin to see what synergy is all about. There's bad news for the Bush administration from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel. Late last week Richard Lugar, the Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, publicly scolded the Bushmen and warned them that their victory in Iraq was "at risk." But Lugar pulled what might have been his most effective punch when he rather delicately pointed out that continued failure in Iraq would create "an incubator for terrorist cells and activity." The incubator Lugar alludes to is more like a factory, and it has been pumping out product since the invasion of Afghanistan. You have only to look to the waves of foreign volunteers who streamed into Iraq to wage jihad against the Americans at the outset of the war--more than 10,000, according to the European press. And events since then have no doubt galvanized countless more.