Showing posts with label WOT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WOT. Show all posts

Thursday, December 03, 2009

Will: Will Not End Well

RealClearPolitics - This Will Not End Well

A good one from George.

But after 11 months of graceless disparagements of the 43rd president, the 44th acts as though he is the first president whose predecessor bequeathed a problematic world. And Obama's second new Afghanistan policy in less than nine months strikingly resembles his predecessor's plan for Iraq, which was: As Iraq's security forces stand up, U.S. forces will stand down. 
Having vowed to "finish the job," Obama revealed Tuesday that he thinks the job in Afghanistan is to get out of Afghanistan. This is an unserious policy.



Wednesday, December 02, 2009

The BO View From Abroad

Opinion: Searching in Vain for the Obama Magic - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

Whenever Bush would give a speech on matters of war, the MSM provided us with the obligatory "lack of respect from abroad" view. Gee, doesn't look like they would have any trouble finding that now if they looked a bit.

One wonders if cynicism has any limits. BO who was 100% against the Surge in Iraq, now takes credit for an "orderly exit" with no mention that it was the Surge that made that possible. He institutes his own "2nd Surge" (his first was in March) in Afghanistan, but rather than stand up and take the heat of "we are committed to objectives, not dates", he goes ahead and states a date where he will start withdrawal. It is hard to come up with the perfect analogy for committing troops for a specific duration. Men are being sent to fight and die when the enemy knows that if they just run and hide for 18 months, the US troops will be gone and they can mop up the Afghan forces at their leisure. Maybe getting married and promising to not have any other women for the next 18 months would be similar.

This quote is a good summary:

Never before has a speech by President Barack Obama felt as false as his Tuesday address announcing America's new strategy for Afghanistan. It seemed like a campaign speech combined with Bush rhetoric -- and left both dreamers and realists feeling distraught.

The following is a rather breathtaking assessment. "The least truthful address" for BO gives one huge pause -- the mind reels to try to think of any that had even a mild sprinkling of truthful content, but indeed, this one is certainly in the running for most disingenuous.
One didn't have to be a cadet on Tuesday to feel a bit of nausea upon hearing Obama's speech. It was the least truthful address that he has ever held. He spoke of responsibility, but almost every sentence smelled of party tactics. He demanded sacrifice, but he was unable to say what it was for exactly.

Sunday, December 28, 2008

The Dark Side, Are We Safer?

http://www.amazon.com/The-Dark-Side-Inside-American/dp/0307456293

I've read three books on roughly the Iraq, War on Terror theme this fall, I'm trying to catch up on my book reporting. I've been reading well, just not writing about it much. The thesis of this book is basically that the Bush administration has committed all sorts of torture crimes, none of which have netted any information and all of which have hurt the US, probably irreparably in the world. The book could have had one of those 1-2--09 "The End of an ERROR" bumper stickers on it.

Interestingly, as books like this often do, page 114 says:

"On August 5, 1998 a month after the Albanian rendition, in what was to take on the aura of a very personal vendetta, an Arab-language newspaper in London published a letter from Zawahiri threatening retaliation against the United States--in a "language they will understand". He warned that America's "message has been received and that the response, which we hope they will read carefully is being prepared" Two days later, the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were blown up, killing 224 people.
I guess that would be "very early" in the evil Bush administration. A lot of the book is more supposed detail than one would ever want to know about the supposedly secret "renditions", where a terror suspect is jetted to an intermediate country for "intensive interrogation" -- or "torture" depending on your perspective. The book is certain at least during the Bush administration it was torture -- I'd assume that the standards that they applied to "early Bush" in '98 would be more lenient.

Page 137 has another tidbit:

"When Tenet dropped the bombshell. He said that they had a high-level Al Quaeda figure who just told them that Al Quaeda and Saddam Hussein's secret police trained together in Baghdad--and chemical and biological weapons were involved."
When one reads the detailed record of Iraq, a few things hit very hard:

1). The thoughts and policies carried out in the Bush Administration nearly all have their genesis in the Clinton Administration, '98 or earlier.

2). Carrying over George Tenent as CIA director from Clinton was a fateful decision for Bush. One can't really tell if he was incompetent or something more sinister, but many of the pieces of information on which decisions were made turned out to be either "wrong", or "not possible to prove/defend given the infighting with CIA/State and the Bush Administration". Very clear statements made by the CIA that can't be verified by facts on the ground once the invasion happens are taken as "Bush failings".

3). The same policy and in some cases, even actions ("renditions", military action in Iraq, wiretaps, etc) taken under Clinton suddenly become somehow "sinister" under Bush.
Page 167, "Sexual humiliation was a regular feature of the SERE program. In addition, the notion that Arabs were particularly vulnerable to it became an article of faith among many conservatives in Washington."
Uh, just conservatives? The idea that countries where women trundle around in packs covered from head to toe in cloth 10 steps behind, might expose the males to some "vulnerability" to sexual humiliation by women? One would expect that it would be at the very least "different" from their standard experience, and I know I've read a number of articles in the MSM that apparently have that same misconception as those poor simple Washington conservatives supposedly had.

Mostly the book is dedicated to the evil of David Addington, Cheney's chief of staff, but Doug Feith and the Rumsfeld pentagon get in for some blame as well. Naturally, "the claim that needs no support" -- that "all the efforts of the Bush administration made us much less safe" runs throughout the book. As the last sentence of the book says "fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools".

As I've argued before, one might think that such thinking might require some sort of objective measure. My statement has been since we had the Cole attack in Oct of 2000 and then 9-11 the year Bush took office, if we are indeed now less safe, we ought to have had something similar to Cole in late '08 and be looking for something, or some group of things worse than 9-11 in similar timing in 2009. Perhaps someone can suggest "better criteria" -- although when one realizes that there were a number of attacks during the Clinton administration (first WTC, Covar Towers, Embassy bombings and Cole), and NONE during the post 9-11 Bush administration, it seems that the statement of us being "less safe" would at least be open to question by those thinking in less than purely ideological terms.

It is a hard book to recommend -- the summary is pretty much "Bush, Cheney really really bad, torturers, failures, incompetent, did nothing helpful, everything wrong -- they ought to be prosecuted as war criminals". If you believe that, then you would likely enjoy the book -- and like most of the folks that agree with you, be willing to overlook the odd little things thrown in about "renditions" in '98, CIA stated connections between Saddam and Al Qaeda and such.

My sense is that we are due for a lot of willful ignorance of factual information for a good long while now. Hopefully whatever it was that has kept us safe from attacks since 9-11 was either something unrelated to Bush, or something that Obama will be willing to keep going on the sly so the string continues. If not, then there will likely be terrorist attacks and the need to respond to them in some way that is "without fear and anxiety, by moderate and capable thinkers". If that time comes, I'm sure his worshipfulness BO will step right up, take responsibility, and give us clear direction as to the "smart way" to handle a terrorist attack.

Monday, January 22, 2007

Clipmark of Islam for Peace

As I surf the web, sometimes for just a couple minutes, I run into things that I want to save and maybe blog on later. I installed something called "Clipmarks" into FireFox that allows me to create and save "snippets" or "clips" of the web and to comment and share with others. I've been experimenting with a number of these "Web 2.0 Technogies" over the break and after.

Here is a Clipmark on the subject of "why we fight". It is CNN/MSM, so lefties can trust it. Lots of peaceful sentiments, looks like we we are overreacting in the War On Terror.

At a recent debate over the battle for Islamic ideals in England, a British-born Muslim stood before the crowd and said Prophet Mohammed's message to nonbelievers is: "I come to slaughter all of you."

"We are the Muslims," said Omar Brooks, an extremist also known as Abu Izzadeen. "We drink the blood of the enemy, and we can face them anywhere. That is Islam and that is jihad."


"All of the world belongs to Allah, and we will live according to the Sharia wherever we are," said Choudary, a lawyer. "This is a fundamental belief of the Muslims." (Watch a call for Islamic law Video)

Asked if he believes in democracy, he said, "No, I don't at all."

"One day, the Sharia will be implemented in Britain. It's a matter of time."

Clipmarks clip on religion of peace

"Peace" is always easy, just like with the USSR. We could have saved a lot of defense dollars if we just signed up to be members of the Communist Party and did it the Gulag way. Same deal today, oddly the left seems to be OK with Burkas and stoning Gays as long as a group that is anti-American does it.