BLOWBACK!

Since he initiated the second war on Iraq, Bush has been proclaiming that we are fighting terrorists there so that we don't have to fight them at home. Unfortunately for Spain, Britain and Australia, the Aznar, Blair and Howard governments believed him. Now that they've fully thrown open up the gates of hell we see the results: worldwide recruitment of jihadists has swelled, they rush to Iraq for peerless training in urban terror, then bring it back home.

In the 1980's we armed and trained Osama bin Laden and the mujahadeen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Then they turned on us. The CIA has a word for that...blowback.

That’s the unexpected repercussion from ill-advised foreign policy; the unintended consequence of propping up unsavory dictators and arming insurgents to topple regimes that we don’t find sympathetic.

In the 1980's we also armed Saddam Hussein's dictatorship with conventional and biological weapons to fight the fundamentalist Shiite Ayatollahs in Iran. Hundreds of thousands died during a seven-year fight to a draw. Then Saddam turned on Kuwait...blowback!

In 2003 we invaded Iraq ostensibly to fight terrorism and instead enabled the transformation of a Jordanian bit-player named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi into the mastermind of a deadly new branch, Al Quaeda In Mesopotamia, that is fast eclipsing Osama bin Laden’s Afghanistan Al Qaeda with its mayhem...major blowback!

In 2005 we propped up in Iraq a Shiite majority "democracy" and will soon have to deal with the fact that Iran, an anti-American Shiite theocracy with real weapons of mass destruction, has thousands of covert agents who now pass freely into Iraq to cement alliances and ensure that Sunni participation is nullified; a strategy they were never able to achieve in the 80’s while Saddam Hussein’s pan-Arab secular Ba’athist party was in power....impending blowback.