WASHINGTON — While the White House prefers to focus on Iraq and the clear threat the Bush administration insists that Saddam Hussein poses, the accelerating series of worldwide terrorist attacks is wrenching the administration’s emphasis back to the unfinished and amorphous war against al-Qaida.
The weekend bombing outside a nightclub in Indonesia and other recent attacks, presumed to be the work of al-Qaida, are adding new credence to administration critics who contend that the White House has been imperiling the war against al-Qaida terror cells by shifting the world’s attention and the nation’s resources to a potential war against Iraq.
“Al-Qaida is proving that their capacity is unlimited and they can go anywhere, yet we have our president focused completely on Iraq, which is almost a sideshow to what al-Qaida is doing,” said Youssef Ibrahim, an expert on Iraq at the Council on Foreign Relations. “If al-Qaida has proved anything in the past three days, it is that we are very far away from having won the war on terror.”
President Bush agreed with at least part of that sentiment Monday, saying that “It’s going to take a while to succeed,” but he also warned that Hussein might use al-Qaida to “do his dirty work,” and that ridding Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction is just as integral a part of the war on terrorism as pursuing al-Qaida.
— Howard Witt, Chicago Tribune (KRT)