Stating the obvious

John McCain has taken a neo-Bush line on Iraq:

…I am told that Senator Obama made the statement that if Al Qaeda came back to Iraq after he withdraws -- after the American troops are withdrawn -- then he would send military troops back, if Al Qaeda established a military base in Iraq. I have some news: Al Qaeda is in Iraq. Al Qaeda, it's called Al Qaeda in Iraq, and my friends if we left they wouldn't be establishing a base, they wouldn't be establishing a base, they'd be taking a country. And I'm not going to allow that to happen my friends. I will not surrender. I will not surrender to Al Qaeda.

We can expect to hear a lot more of this, especially if Obama is the Democratic nominee.

What needs to be said is that this is plainly hooey. As Eric Martin points out on his blog, al Qaeda--whether in Iraq or anywhere else--cannot triumph in any political sense. Even if Iraq were not a majority-Shi'ite country (al Qaeda is militantly Sunni and thus anti-Shi'ite), the widely divergent world view of most Sunni insurgents from the religious extremism of bin Laden's followers would toll the knell for any ambitions that al Qaeda might have to come out on top.

The fact is that bin Laden and his people are (to borrow from Catholic Spain) on a quixotic campaign that has no more chance of triumph than the crusade of the deluded don. True, they might cause a great deal of harm, but they lack now and are extremely unlikely ever to attain a power base that would make them a real threat to the west in general or the United States in particular.

The US, by remaining frozen in the aftermath of 9/11, only empowers al Qaeda and enhances its attraction, especially among young, disaffected Muslim men.

There are powerful anti-western currents in the Muslim world--Iran and its Shi'ite allies in Hezbollah (and non-Shi'ite allies such as Hamas) primary among them--but uncritical concentration on al Qaeda weakens our response to them and, thus strengthens our enemies.

Obvious? Yes. But it will need to be repeated time after time in the next seven and a half-months.