As the New York Times finally got around to pointing out this morning, no ‘stark choice’ exists between George Bush and John Kerry – at least regarding foreign policy, the subject of tonight’s first debate. Instead, the two major party candidates “differ only slightly, if at all” on many foreign policy issues.

Case in point: Bush and Kerry — and American puppet aka Iraqi leader Iyad Allawi — are in total agreement that foreign terrorists are pouring into Iraq. So what if virtually all US military intelligence analysts hotly dispute this communal assertion! Like most good stories these days, this one has been largely ignored by the MSM – with the notable exception of Mark Mazzetti in the Los Angeles Times. In an article datelined September 28, Mazzetti accurately noted that “The insistence by interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and many U.S. officials that foreign fighters are streaming into Iraq to battle American troops runs counter to the U.S. military’s own assessment that the Iraqi insurgency remains primarily a home-grown problem.”

During his propaganda visit to the U.S. last week, Allawi spoke of foreign insurgents “flooding” his country. Allawi was only echoing President Bush and Democratic challenger, John F. Kerry, both of whom, for their own very different reasons, have taken to citing these fighters as a major security problem. In interviews, Allawi spoke of foreign jihadists “coming in the hundreds to Iraq” and estimated that foreign fighters constituted 30% of insurgent forces.

One problem: top U.S. military officers in Iraq almost universally say the foreign fighters threat is far less significant than the politicians are asserting. As Mazzetti reports, the military analysts note that Iraqi officials tend “to exaggerate the number of foreign fighters in Iraq to obscure the fact that large numbers of their countrymen have taken up arms against U.S. troops and the American-backed interim Iraqi government.”

“They say these guys are flowing across [the border] and fomenting all this violence. We don’t think so,” a senior military official in Baghdad told the LA Times. “What’s the main threat? It’s internal.”

Apparently the main threat in the USA is internal as well, which may explain why both Bush and Kerry are parroting Allawi’s obvious lie. Bush maintains that the “foreign fighters streaming into Iraq” prove that the war there is linked to the global war on terrorism. Kerry, on the other hand, says the “terrorists pouring across the border” are proof that Bush administration has turned Iraq into a magnet for foreign fighters hoping to kill Americans.

Mazzetti’s article concludes by quoting one U.S. intelligence official.” People try to turn this into the mujahedin, jihad war. It’s not that. How many foreign fighters have been captured and processed?”

How many indeed?

Of course, there is one presidential candidate who hasn’t been singing in the Iraqi Amens Choir. He’s the same candidate who has been forcefully advocating for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq as soon as possible – a position that this writer has long espoused but one evidently not shared by George Bush, John Kerry or Iyad Allawi.

In fact, he’s the only person running for president who has a definite plan for withdrawing US troops. Needless to say, you won’t see him on television in tonight’s not-so Great Debate. He wasn’t invited to participate.

His name is Ralph Nader.

Oops! I said it again!