01/12/2004: 
Fraud & Conspiracy
U.S. Army War College Calls Out Bush on Iraq
from FAS Project on Govt Secrecy
In its "global war on terrorism," the Bush Administration has mistakenly conflated several distinct types of national security threats into a single monolithic threat, according to a new study published by the U.S. Army, and "in so doing...may have set the United States on a course of open-ended and gratuitous conflict with states and nonstate entities that pose no serious threat to the United States."
"Of particular concern has been the conflation of al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat. This was a strategic error of the first order because it ignored critical differences between the two in character, threat level, and susceptibility to U.S. deterrence and military action."
"The war against Iraq was not integral to the [war on terrorism], but rather a detour from it," the Army study concludes.
The study was reported today in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.
See "Bounding the Global War on Terrorism" by Jeffrey Record,[Acrobat Reader required] originally published by the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College, December 2003.
