Follow up to the arming of Sunni Insurgents

I just read an interesting although somewhat confusing article on slate.com regarding the arming of Sunni Insurgent groups that I posted on yesterday:

http://www.slate.com/id/2168400/fr/flyout

This article seems at times to make opposing points, and may simply be a symptom of how confused and hopeless our entire Iraq situation has become, but it suggested one interesting point to me that I thought worth making here.

The article says that "The main Bush argument for the surge has been that a withdrawl would embolden Al Qaeda in its actions in Iraq and around the world." I've heard Bush make versions of this argument many times, some version of the idea that "Iraq is the frontline of the war on terror and the fight against Al Qaeda."

Now, hardly anyone disputes that Al Qaeda had no significant presence in Iraq until we arrived there. Even the idea that Saddam supported and sponsored terrorism has been disproven, much less the idea that there was a terrorist presence actually inside the country. So we created the Al Qaeda presence there by going there and setting up shop.

Now if I, as a member of society, start a fight. If I throw a punch on someone, and they start to fight back, and they get the upper hand, and then I kill them, I get charged with murder. That is, the fact that the person was fighting me and might have killed me is not a mitigating circumstance, because I started the fight. The situation would never have existed had I not thrown the first punch. Yet it seems that in the case of nations, such behavior is justified, at least according to the logic of this administration.

Why is it that behavior not allowed within a country is nonetheless practiced by the country. Doesn't this seem hyperbolically hypocritical? We should not be able to use Al Qaeda as a justification for our continued presence in Iraq, because we brought them there and inflicted them on the Iraqi people.