The Daily Background

One of the (current) justifications for staying in Iraq that the Bush Administration has been pushing for the past six months or so is that Iraq is a ‘central front’ in their ‘war on terror.’

“You know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror,” President Bush said in a 2006 interview.

The idea is that we are ‘fighting al Qaeda in Iraq’ and that therefore withdrawing or redeploying from Iraq would mean that we were running away from terrorists. And, as their saying goes, it’s better to ‘fight them there’ rather than ‘fight them here.’

But there is a central problem in this argument, that people have been pointing out for some time now. And that is that most of the incidents of violence that American soldiers in Iraq are being exposed to– i.e. most of the people ‘we’re fighting’– aren’t al Qaeda or non-Iraqi terrorist groups. The vast, vast majority of anti-US forces in Iraq are Iraqi insurgents, not terrorists.

Below is a graph which I hope will dispell some myths not only about who US forces are fighting in Iraq, but also myths about the breadth of the so-called “coalition of the willing.”

Filed under: Iraq Related, Z-TDB Blog