War against Iraq deflecting real focus

By Maurice Ndole

Two years after the Sept. 11 attacks— still no Osama Bin Laden and the search for the man who is responsible for the death of more than 3,000 Americans is no longer the priority in the war on terror.

The hunt for Bin Laden has been replaced with an amorphous war in Iraq.
But the Iraq war, which was supposed to wean Saddam Hussein from his non-existent weapons of mass destruction, is now a quagmire.

That, however, is not a problem; the problem is that the Bush administration cannot admit that the situation in Iraq is getting worse—they adamantly want to stay the course. The wrong course.
What will it take for the administration to admit that the situation in Iraq is a conglomeration of catastrophes that needs re-evaluation?

Is the administration missing the signs? I don’t think so; the misfortunes in this war are too gigantic not to see.

The soldiers were not received with flowers or greeted like liberators as vice president Dick Cheney predicted. More than 1,000 American soldiers have been killed, and the armed insurgency is getting worse. Kidnappings and beheadings are now a daily occurrence, and the CIA said there are possibilities of a civil war.

The bombs, bad economy and insecurity have reduced Baghdad, Iraq’s capital, to a complicated ghetto.

Not everybody, thank heavens, is in denial about the deteriorating situation in Iraq.

Pakistan’s President, Pervez Musharaff, America’s ally in the war on terror who has survived two assassination attempts for his support to America, said in an interview with CNN’s Paula Zahn Friday that the war on Iraq has made the world unsafe and complicated the war against terrorism.

But ironically, Iraq’s interim Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, whose hand was recently injured in an assassination attempt, said the reports about violence in Iraq were exaggerated.

Allawi’s optimism, however, cannot hide the fact that his country is now a magnet for terrorists who are threatening stability in the whole region.

It is time to change course in Iraq; accepting the sad reality is the first step toward solving the crisis.