Why is everyone liking this post?
Cause it's a quick zinger about how, back then, various governments and non-state actors were conflated with each other as Islamofascist/terrorist/evil/whatever in public statements by government officials and their supporters in the media?
You could downgrade it for being glib, but it's a one-liner. That's the medium.
It doesn't make any sense, though. There was no al Qaida nor Taliban in Iraq in 2003. There were both in Afghanistan. American foreign policy did care about the difference in Afghanistan because it felt the Taliban was mostly destroyed while Al Qaida was the target. The pretext for war in Iraq wasn't dependent on US foreign policy caring about the difference between AQ and Taliban. Maybe the US NOT caring about the difference would have made more sense, but even that's a stretch. IT JUST DOESN'T MAKE SENSE. UNLIKE THAT POST.
Huh...are you denying that US foreign policy circa the early aughts were fraught with a general conflation of varying ideologies, groups, etc into one giant ball of confusion? Be it Sunnis and Shiites, Taliban and AQ, Saddamn Hussein and Bin Laden, etc - there are multiple cases of a certain administration simplifying complex relationships into a good/bad dynamic. That was the point of the post/zinger, which I figured would be rather obvious.
Much of the administration didn't know about the sectarian nature of Iraq society before the invasion.
