London and Iraq

To those who would try to buttress the argument supporting the Iraq war with the London terror attacks of yesterday, Josh Marshall writes

Today we've had a reminder of what we face. But let's be clear what we're seeing. In more venues than I'd care to admit I've seen posts and speechifying which say, in so many words: "For all those who've gone wobbly on Iraq, see, you got complacent! But terrorism is real!"

The real threat we face isn't in Iraq. And being in Iraq isn't diminishing it. The real threat is painfully low-tech but yet highly-lethal acts of terror committed -- in most cases -- in the great metropoles of the West. And I suspect we'll find, as we did in 9/11, that the immediate perpetrators were neither people who were minding their own business before we invaded Iraq nor even people who have their main base in the core countries of the Arab Middle East, but rather recruits from the disaffected and deracinated diaspora of Muslim immigrants in the West -- a tiny fraction out of the millions who are making their homes in our country and in those of Europe.

...

The threat of terrorism is very real, especially in major cities. But with respect to the folks who want to lasso this into a pillar of support for a disastrous policy in Iraq, frankly, we already knew terrorism was real. Most people are sick to death of our bumbling in Iraq because it's distracted us from actually defending ourselves.