Juan Cole Interviewed on Iraq

MetroTimes, a Detroit alternative newspaper, interviews Juan Cole. From the interview:

In my view. the U.S. government, if it were really worried about al-Qaida, shouldn’t have been invading Iraq. Iraq didn’t have anything to do with al-Qaida. If we had spent the kind of money were spending in Iraq on fighting al-Qaida, it would have been got 10 times over. Now we’re going to end up spending a trillion, 2 trillion dollars on the Iraq misadventure. I don’t know what we’ve spent fighting al-Qaida, but it’s been a relatively small amount. That tells me something — that the Bush administration is far more interested in reconfiguring Iraq than it is in fighting al-Qaida. And yet the rhetoric is all about the war on terror and al-Qaida.

I think the American right has long managed to throw resources to its clients and to scare the American people into giving up some of their rights by looking to external threats like the Soviet Union, communism and now al-Qaida and international terrorism. It always exaggerates the real magnitude of the threat, and the U.S. public seems to be easily scared, easily intimidated into forfeiting its birthright, which is the liberties of the U.S. Constitution, and I think we should push back.