News flash: Al Qaida in Iraq! Therefore, US troops must stay?

Our favorite foreign policy analyst, Jessica McBride, continues to write posts suggesting that because Al Qaida is now in Iraq, US troops must remain there.

In McBride's World, Iraq seems to be the home of Al Qaida. Her most recent commentary:

John Edwards admits Al-Qaida is in Iraq

The AP:

"Today, as a result of what George Bush has done, we have more terrorists and fewer allies," Edwards said at a news conference. "There was no group called al-Qaida in Iraq before this president's war in Iraq."

The follow-up question that wasn't asked: Why do you want to leave Iraq to fight al-Qaida then?

Edwards is exactly right when he says that it is the US who brought Al Qaida to Iraq.

The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz team did its best to make people believe that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were somehow in a conspiracy before the Sept. 11 attacks. That falsehood, and the non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, helped sell the American public on the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The result of that tragic mistake is that Iraq has become a breeding ground for terrorists, with members of Al Qaida and other terrorist groups infiltrating the country.

In McBride's twisted logic, as long as Al Qaida is in Iraq, US forces must stay.

Last week, when insurgents claimed they had killed three captured American soldiers, McBride called it "a critical test" for Democrats. She made it sound as though Al Qaida itself had made the claim, when it was an insurgent umbrella group that includes, among many others, Al Qaida in Mesopotamia. In her hysterical response, she asked:

Will Democrats continue to support stripping funding from the troops so they can't track down these murderers?

Do they still support withdrawing our troops immediately?

Do they still support withdrawing our troops by some arbitrary date whether or not we catch these murderers and eradicate al-Qaida in Iraq?

Do they still believe we should redeploy the troops to Okinawa or some other place?

Apparently, the answer she's looking for is that US troops will stay in Iraq forever. Despite thousands of troops searching for weeks now, the missing soldiers or their captors/killers have not been found, and probably won't be.

To suggest that US troops must stay until the last Al Qaida zealot is eliminated reminds us of the argument that we must keep sending more troops to be killed so that those who have already been killed "will not have died in vain."

Neither one holds water.