We are now waging a global war on terror - from the mountains of Afghanistan to the border regions of Pakistan, to the Horn of Africa, to the islands of the Philippines, to the plains of Iraq.
And recently at the heart of Mumbai City in India.
We In Malaysia are lucky so far because we will stay on the offense. Like US we are willing to fight the terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them at home.
In Iraq, on the other hand, hostility toward America is practically the only thing that all insurgents agree on—foreign infiltrators and native recruits alike. And jihadists in Iraq are getting direct, on-the-job training in a real-life insurgency, with hands-on experience in bombing, sniping and all the skills of urban warfare, unlike the essentially artificial training that was given at Al Qaeda's rural Afghan camps.
In effect, Iraq is producing a new corps of master terrorists with an incandescent hatred for the United States and it associated countries like India, Pakistan Australia and Indonesia. This war is proving to be longer and nastier than almost anyone expected. One day, its results may be felt closer to home.
It's very possible that someone involved in the attacks spent time honing skills in Iraq. Or now a days at a place like Kashmir in Pakistan. Or Jakarta In Indonesia. Even if no one involved had been to Iraq, we still have yet another example (after Bali, Madrid, and Beslan, to name a few) of terrorists who have not been attracted to Iraq to be killed by American forces. Instead, they're still happily murdering people around the world.
Since 9/11 United States had attracted lots of terrorists and would be terrorists to Iraq - and kill enough of them so that they can no longer organize attacks. US kill them - in foreign lands so they cannot return to America (And the rest of the Western world - right? They still count too, right?) to launch new attacks. Of course, this was dumb from day number one.
When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, would-be jihadists flocked to the country en masse. The Soviets spent a decade and lost 15,000 troops fighting the Afghan mujahedeen and their Arab allies. They killed tens of thousands of them. And yet, after all that, there were still enough jihadists to organize al Qaeda and its associated organizations, and to launch all of their murderous attacks of the last decade and a half.
Turning Iraq into the first Arab democracy, from which democracy will spread to other Arab countries, ending the regimes that made it possible for radical political Islam to grow. Ignoring the fact that many Islamic radicals come from democracies and not dictatorships (how many of the September 11 hijackers lived in Germany?)
It's a meaningless question. No matter how many terrorists we kill, more can just take their place. It's like asking: how many murderers do we have to kill before there's no more murder, ever again? We can kill a lot of terrorists, and we can attract a lot of would-be terrorists and kill them before they can do any harm.
What gives United States the right to use a sovereign nation as a catch basin for carnage so they can go on blissfully consuming and merrily flipping real estate , this should be called the "Night of the Living Dead Nation" strategy---using the undead, zombie-like carcass of a failed state for their own benefit.
United States as a most powerful nation ini the planet, can affect the operational capability of some groups and they can destroy others outright. But they can never get them all, because not all of them will go to Iraq or Afghanistan. In this case they went to Mumbai instead.
Not all of them will be killed, and not all of them even exist yet.
Even if United States thought they could kill lots of terrorists very quickly, they are still trying to attract terrorists, who are going to practice terrorism into a Developing countries that they want to rebuild as quickly as possible.
The whole point of the war in Iraq , according to US, was to end terrorism in the long-term by destroying the conditions which created it, and that starts with Iraq. It is, according to them, utterly vital to our national security and our survival. . Does this make any sense? Any construction contractors out there? How easy is it to complete a project which is being sabotaged by terrorists while the Marines shoot back?
However, United States are still pretending not to know and shut their eyes from the source of terrorism. Hoping Obama will do something about this.