Iraq War Kept U.S. Safe-Washington Post Admits

In a stunning admission, the Washington Post said Sunday that President Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq deserves at least some of the credit for the fact that terrorists have not been able to launch another 9/11-style strike against America.

"A broad cross section of counterterrorism officials believes al Qaeda and like-minded groups, in part frustrated by increased U.S. security measures, are focusing instead on Americans deployed in Iraq," the paper said, "where the groups operate with relative impunity."

Bush administration officials have long argued that taking the war to the terrorists' doorstep was the best way of drawing fire away from the homeland, while "draining the swamp" of global terrorism's most notorious players.
Conventional media wisdom held, however, that the war had actually boosted al-Qaida recruitment - generating an even greater threat to the U.S. than would have otherwise been the case.

Intelligence officials cited by the Post, however, now say just the opposite has happened.


"Reports of credible terrorist threats against the United States are at their lowest level since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001," according to U.S. intelligence officials and federal and state law enforcement authorities cited by the paper.

Even in the Middle East, the Bush administration's offensive strategy seems to have produced results from a national security standpoint.

With their ability to communicate and move about freely limited by tight U.S. and Pakistani surveillance, Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenant, Ayman al Zawahiri, have both recently urged Abu Musab al Zarqawi, chief of al-Qaida operations in Iraq, to organize attacks on the U.S. homeland.

But Zarqawi himself remains pinned down by U.S. forces in and around Baghdad, with almost weekly reports of skirmishes where he's barely eluded capture.

Unnoted by the Post, the war has also eliminated a key safe haven for global terrorism - Iraq had for decades played host to some of the most notorious perpetrators of attacks against American civilians.


Abu Nidal, whose terror organization is credited with dozens of attacks that killed over 400 people, lived in Baghdad from 1999 till August 2002, when he was found shot to death in his state-supplied home.

Abu Abbas, who masterminded the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship, during which wheelchair-bound American Leon Klinghoffer was shot dead and pushed over the side of the ship - died in U.S. custody after being captured in Baghdad.

Khala Khadar al-Salahat, who was a top Palestinian deputy to Abu Nidal and who reportedly furnished Libyan agents with the Semtex explosive used to blow up Pan Am Flight 103, was captured in Baghdad in 2003.

Zarqawi himself, who ran an Ansar al-Islam terrorist training camp in northern Iraq before the U.S. invaded in March 2003, was treated for a broken leg at a state-run Baghdad hospital in the 1990s.
While Zarqawi and many in his inner circle remain at large, counterterrorism experts now believe they're too busy with operations in Iraq to plan and execute anything like another 9/11.

Like it or not you anti-war pussies, America is safer because of our brave military and a leader who had the forsight to see that it needed to be done! Now that this has been a huge "I told you so!", you can now crawl back under the security of the rock you have been hiding under, or go back to sticking your head in the sand.