We're Fighting Them Over There So That Al-Qaeda Can Get The Funding It Needs

Another sickening Bush administration disaster...

...In one of the most troubling trends, U.S. officials said that Al Qaeda's command base in Pakistan is increasingly being funded by cash coming out of Iraq, where the terrorist network's operatives are raising substantial sums from donations to the anti-American insurgency as well as kidnappings of wealthy Iraqis and other criminal activity...

Little more than a year ago, Al Qaeda's core command was thought to be in a financial crunch. But U.S. officials said cash shipped from Iraq has eased those troubles."Iraq is a big moneymaker for them," said a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official....

The officials were charged with reinvigorating a search [for Bin Laden] that had atrophied when some U.S. intelligence assets and special forces teams were pulled out of Afghanistan in 2002 to prepare for the war with Iraq...."We're not any closer," said a senior U.S. military official who monitors the intelligence on the hunt for Bin Laden....

As for our "good ally" Pakistan's deal with Al-Qaeda a while back...

Everything was undermined by the so-called peace agreement in north Waziristan," said a senior U.S. intelligence official responsible for overseeing counter-terrorism operations. "Of all the things that work against us in the global war on terror, that's the most damaging development. The one thing Al Qaeda needs to plan an attack is a relatively safe place to operate." Some in the administration initially expressed concern over the Pakistani move, but Bush later praised it, following a White House meeting with Musharraf....

So, we pull our guys off the hunt for Bin Laden in Afghanistan to go to Iraq, but our presence in Iraq ends up being a huge financial windfall for Al-Qaeda, and we still have no clue where the guy behind 9/11 is. Swell.

Bin Laden couldn't ask for a better (unwitting) ally than GW Bush.