Texan Friend of Bush
Rips Iraq War

by Paul Sperry

A former Department of Homeland Security official who also worked for George W. Bush in Texas says his old friend exaggerated the threat from Saddam Hussein and only made America less safe by attacking Iraq.

Before serving as Bush's first Homeland Security inspector general, Clark Kent Ervin worked for the former governor in Texas as assistant secretary of state and deputy attorney general. He also was an aide in Bush Sr.'s White House last decade.

Ervin says it was the "thrill of a lifetime" to return to Washington to work for "a man I counted as a friend." He was a Bush loyalist, to be sure.

But then his old pal invaded Iraq in the middle of a war on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, and Ervin feared the worst. He saw special forces, intelligence assets, and other resources diverted to an unnecessary war, buying time for bin Laden to regroup on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. At the same time, he worried the unjustified Iraq war would inspire more anti-American jihadists and enlarge the recruiting pool for bin Laden.

His fears were recently confirmed by the U.S. intelligence community in a partially declassified report on Iraq, which concludes the U.S. occupation there is the "cause célèbre" among jihadists around the world.

"The war in Iraq has actually increased the pool of violently anti-American Islamic fundamentalists from whom al-Qaeda and like-minded groups can recruit jihadists to strike our homeland," laments Ervin, author of Open Target: Where America Is Vulnerable to Attack.

He says bin Laden might be in custody today if Bush had stayed focused on al-Qaeda and not sent troops to a false front in Iraq, where al-Qaeda wannabes are now getting on-the-job training in how to kill Americans.

"Had we stayed on the hunt in Afghanistan and not diverted time, attention, and resources to an exaggerated threat in Iraq, Osama bin Laden might be dead or in custody today," Ervin says. "And Iraq might not have become a terrorist training camp and recruiting ground."

He asserts that al-Qaeda is, and always has been, the real threat to America; Saddam and his Ba'athist bullies had been declawed in the first Iraq war.

Finished at http://www.antiwar.com/sperry/?articleid=9886