So how long will it take before we finely go back to fighting the war on terror? And take out a country that really is responsible for 911? How about it war supporters! Shouldn't we attack Saudi Arabia? Biden: More Foreigners Fight U.S. in Iraq More foreign fighters than ever are crossing Iraq's porous borders to fight U.S. and Iraqi forces, and a growing number are from U.S.-ally Saudi Arabia, a Senate Democrat said Thursday. "The mix is changing," said Sen. Joseph Biden (news, bio, voting record), D-Del., citing conversations last week in Iraq with Marine and Army generals. "Now, the mix is increasingly more Islamist crossing the border ... and a lot of them are Saudis. It presents a different profile" that is harder for U.S. forces to confront. Biden, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's top Democrat, gave no specific numbers, for foreign fighters as a whole or for the percentage from Saudi Arabia. He said he was told repeatedly that the totals are going up and that Saudis are "a disproportionate number." "They kept talking about their belief ... that more in terms of numbers of jihadists are crossing the border, more sophisticatedly trained and more capable of doing harm and damage than existed a month ago, three months ago, five months ago," Biden told reporters. In the past, the U.S. military has said foreign fighters are a small percentage — perhaps one in 10 — of the insurgents fighting the U.S. presence in Iraq. They do a disproportionate amount of killing, however, in part because they are more likely to carry out suicide bombings. U.S. and other analysts say the foreign fighters are primarily Islamic jihadists, fighting what they claim are anti-Islamic invaders, while the much larger homegrown, mostly Sunni Arab, insurgency has tended to be motivated more by political grievance and factional rivalry. Part of the Bush administration strategy in Iraq is to improve living conditions and security for ordinary Iraqis and thereby reduce support for the homegrown insurgency. That calculation won't work with foreign fighters, Biden said. "If you turn on lights, get the air conditioning running and clean up the sewage, that ain't going to have any impact on the jihadist coming across from Saudi Arabia with a bomb strapped on his stomach," said Biden, who has made five trips to Iraq since U.S. forces overthrew Saddam Hussein a little more than two years ago. The Saudi embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Biden's remarks. Saudis have been among the foreigners captured by U.S. forces inside Iraq, but the Pentagon and the Bush administration have said little about the national backgrounds of foreign fighters. Asked about estimates that Saudis make up 40 percent of suicide bombers recruited to Iraq by the Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Saudi Arabia differs from other nations that may export fighters to Iraq because it is also fighting al-Qaida insurgents on its own territory. "There's no question but that there have been a number of Saudis involved that have been captured throughout the entire activity," Rumsfeld said. Biden said a U.S. troop pullout now would be disastrous, but he accused the Bush administration of glossing over the magnitude of the problems and underestimating the time it will take to fix them. "There is a total disconnect from what I've seen ... being on the ground and what I hear when I come back home," Biden said. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050609/ap_on_go_co/iraq_foreign_insurgents_1
The "Shoe Bomber" was from Great Briton, so should we attack GB? I don't think so. Just because the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi doesn't mean that country is hostile to the U.S.; it just means some people from that country are hostile. Sirhan Sirhan was born in Jerusalem, Palestine (now Israel). Does that mean we should attack Palestine? I think the logic behind Iraq is that poverty and opression in the Middle East breed terror. If we can, somehow, get Iraq into a stable democracy it will lead to other democracies in the region thereby reducing the poverty and opression in the Middle East, thereby reducing the causes of terrorism. I'm not saying it's gonna work (and if it does it will take many, many years) but it's what they are trying to do. So, using that logic, Iraq is a key to the overall war on terrorism.
buddy if you go bomb that country you will be cause a world war...there are 1.3 billion muslims...plus you already have that government in your pocket....thats why there were saudi terrorists involved in the first place....why do you think the 9/11 thing happened??....
But that could apply to practically any country in the Middle East and like you said there's not much guarentee that that logic could work. Its only the key to the overall war on terror because this Admin. doesn't seem to be able to consider other options.
The situation is a lot more complicated and dangerous than you underestimate it to be. The support for terrorists in Saudi Society is widespread and goes to the highest levels of their ruling thug class and has been extensively chronicled.
Vino- The fact that members of the house of Saud and a large segment of the Saudi populace are sympatetic to and enable various terrorist groups is well chronicled. . I recommend Robert Baer's "Sleeping with the Devil" in particular. It's not exactly a coincidence that the ideology, money, and muscle for the September 11 plot came almost entirely from the Arabian peninsula.
