"Now watch me pull a rabbit outta my hat."

The Amazing Bullwinkle
Originally uploaded by vegacura.

Perhaps, after all, the Reality-based Community is no match for the prestidigitation of the Great and Powerful Busho. In the run-up to war in Iraq, we were told among many things, that Iraq was a hot bed for global terrorism threatening the U.S. We in the RBC scoffed. "Hussein has no truck with Islamic terrorists," we would sniff. "He doesn't want to threaten his own power with messianic loonies who could undermine his control of the state, and he certainly isn't so foolish as to harbor anyone who could result in his being Talibanized by the U.S."

But the Great and Powerful Busho was undeterred. Rolling up his sleeves to show that he had no WMD hiding underneath, he reached into the top hat now known as Mess o'Potamia and chanting the ancient chant, "Bring 'em on," and, sure enough, pulled out...an entirely new terrorist network.

Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of "professionalized" terrorists, according to a report released yesterday by the National Intelligence Council, the CIA director's think tank.

Iraq provides terrorists with "a training ground, a recruitment ground, the opportunity for enhancing technical skills," said David B. Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats. "There is even, under the best scenario, over time, the likelihood that some of the jihadists who are not killed there will, in a sense, go home, wherever home is, and will therefore disperse to various other countries."

Of course, like Bullwinkle, Bush has pulled, not a cute bunny rabbit, but a vicious and hungry lion out of his chapeau. But, hey, they're both mammals, right?

But as instability in Iraq grew after the toppling of Hussein, and resentment toward the United States intensified in the Muslim world, hundreds of foreign terrorists flooded into Iraq across its unguarded borders. They found tons of unprotected weapons caches that, military officials say, they are now using against U.S. troops. Foreign terrorists are believed to make up a large portion of today's suicide bombers, and U.S. intelligence officials say these foreigners are forming tactical, ever-changing alliances with former Baathist fighters and other insurgents.

"The al-Qa'ida membership that was distinguished by having trained in Afghanistan will gradually dissipate, to be replaced in part by the dispersion of the experienced survivors of the conflict in Iraq," the report says.

I bow before the reality-shaping magic of the Great and Powerful Busho.