But what does he know, anyway?

Here's the money quote:

The focus on Iraq has robbed domestic security of manpower, brainpower and money, he said. The Iraq war created fissures in the United States' counterterrorism alliances, he said, and could breed a new generation of al Qaeda recruits. Many of his government colleagues, he said, thought Iraq was an "ill-conceived and poorly executed strategy."

Here's the speaker: Rand Beers, former National Security Council member and special assistant to the president for combating terrorism.

I can't get the Washington Post article to display on my browser in a legible format; here's a Whisky Bar report. "In other words, the NSC's top counter-terrorism professional has just confirmed virtually every significant criticism that has been made of the Bush Administration's bizarre obsession with Iraq and its negative consequences for the war against terrorism."

While you're at Whiskey Bar, you really owe it to yourself to read The Naked WMD, in-depth reporting on the post-Iraq situation in the idiom of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker.

Tell people about this.