First of all, [the invasion and occupation of Iraq is] costing us $180 billion in the first two years, and may be even more than that. That money could have been used to reduce our vulnerabilities here at home. In the wake of the Madrid bombing of the trains recently, people have realized what’s been true all along, that our railroads in the United States – our subways, our commuter rails – are not protected. Well, many things in the United States are not protected. There’s a long list of vulnerabilities which we could reduce. It would cost money. We’re not spending that money reducing those vulnerabilities very much. There are some token efforts. There should have been an all-out national effort akin to the Apollo Project, or the Manhattan Project.

But we didn’t do that. And in large part we didn’t do that because the money that would have been necessary is being spent on Iraq. So that’s the first thing: It’s costing us the alternative of reducing our vulnerabilities.

Second, actual military and intelligence assets that were in Afghanistan – looking for al Qaeda, looking for bin Laden – were removed and sent to Iraq. Now, in the last few weeks, they’ve been returned. But that’s two years too late. Two years during which al Qaeda has morphed into a hydra-headed organization with independent organizations and independent cells, and likely the group in Madrid. So we didn’t go after al Qaeda the way that we should have. And we didn’t secure Afghanistan.

We went into Afghanistan in a very slow way after September 11th. A few special forces troops were put up north with the Northern Alliance to fight the Taliban. We did not send people into where we thought bin Laden was for almost two months – during which, of course, he escaped. And then, we only deployed 11,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Now let’s compare that. There are more police in Manhattan – not the city of New York, but just Manhattan – there are more police in Manhattan than the United States put troops into Afghanistan. And yet we were supposed to secure and stabilize the country so that never again would it be a base for terrorism. We were supposed to be draining the swamp.

Well, we haven’t. And one of the reasons we haven’t is that we withheld forces that should have been going into Afghanistan. We withheld them for the war in Iraq.

[...]

The third way is that, al Qaeda had been saying, bin Laden had been saying, that the United States is the “new crusader,” the new westerner come to occupy an Arab country, an oil-rich Arab country. And we did exactly that. We did exactly what bin Laden said we would do: We invaded and occupied an oil-rich Arab country that had not been threatening us. And the sights on Arab television of American troops fighting in Iraq, and now occupying Iraq, have infuriated Arab opinion.

The Pew Charitable Trust does opinion polling, very reliable opinion polling in countries such as Morocco and Jordan and Turkey, Indonesia, Pakistan. Many of those countries – the government, at least – is our friend. We consider them allies, and we consider them moderates. And yet the opinion polls now show that up to 90 percent of people in those countries either hate the United States or have a very negative opinion of the United States. Osama bin Laden is a very popular figure in some of those countries. The most-often given name to new children in Pakistan after 9/11 was Osama.

So, we played right into their hands by invading and occupying, without any provocation, a Muslim country, and at the very time when we should have been doing the opposite. We should have been embracing our Islamic friends and saying, “work with us to have a counterweight, an ideological counterweight to al Qaeda.”

They won’t do that now with us, because many of these governments don’t want to be seen to be working too closely with us now in the Islamic world.

We can’t just arrest and kill terrorists. Even Donald Rumsfeld figured that out. In his internal memo in the Pentagon, which leaked, he said it may be the case that we’re turning out new terrorists faster than we’re killing and arresting them. He’s right; we are. And we have to win the war for ideas. And we can’t do that so long as we are reviled by occupying a country like Iraq.

[Link and transcript via The Gadflyer]