Why should U.S. soldiers lose their lives waging another countrys civil war?
Our enemy, al-Qaeda, seeks to provoke a civil war by bombing Shiite mosques and shrines. If we stand back and allow al-Qaeda’s terrorists to succeed, they will turn Iraq into a base for attacking us, just as they turned Afghanistan into a base for attacking us. The Clinton Administration decided that the U.S. had no stake in the civil war in Afghanistan in the 1990s. Only after the Taliban allowed al-Qaeda to operate from its territory did we discover-too late-that we did have a stake there. A Talibanized Iraq would be like Afghanistan on steroids, fueled by Iraqi oil revenues. The U.S. cannot permit this.
