Like a giant stung by a tiny bee, the US went into a rage after 9/11 and declared a war without end against a small, faceless group armed with box cutters and donkey carts. After spending a fortune and setting fire to two countries, we find our enemies are more numerous and stronger than ever. Oops! DUHbya! [spit on the ground]
When you take off your shoes at the airport or stand in line behind someone buying the common ingredients for explosives, ask yourself if we’re on the right path. Do we simply have to run out the clock on the Gang that Can’t Shoot Straight (but shoots every-which-way)? Is there no holding Duhbya and BushCo accountable for MASSIVE INCOMPETENCE that exceeds all belief? Time for early retirement — there’s brush to be cleared in Crawford, while someone with intelligence attempts to fix this horrible mess. You can’t spell Wrong without Duhbya (he always is). mjh
U.S. Warns Of Stronger Al-Qaeda – washingtonpost.com
Administration Report Cites Havens in Pakistan
By Spencer S. Hsu and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Six years after the Bush administration declared war on al-Qaeda, the terrorist network is gaining strength and has established a safe haven in remote tribal areas of western Pakistan for training and planning attacks, according to a new Bush administration intelligence report to be discussed today at a White House meeting.
The report, a five-page threat assessment compiled by the National Counterterrorism Center, is titled “Al-Qaida Better Positioned to Strike the West,” intelligence officials said. It concludes that the group has significantly rebuilt itself despite concerted U.S. attempts to smash the network.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/11/
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Resolute Amid the Wreckage, By Eugene Robinson
Allowing himself to be forced to retreat from Iraq would ruin George W. Bush’s fantasy of someday being seen as a latter-day Churchill. Bush keeps a bust of the British leader in his office, and he has praised Churchill as being “resolute.”
I know he’s read a book or two about his hero, so I can’t help wondering: Hasn’t Bush gotten to the part about how Churchill, T.E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell created Iraq at the fateful Cairo Conference of 1921? And how the object was to get British forces out of Mesopotamia, leave the fractious locals to their own devices and wish them the best?
“Our object and our policy is to set up an Arab government,” Churchill told Parliament later that year, describing the new country he had helped design, “and to make it take the responsibility, with our aid and our guidance and with an effective measure of our support, until they are strong enough to stand alone, and so to foster the development of their independence as to permit the steady and speedy diminution of our burden.”
Bush’s contribution is essentially to have destroyed the Iraq that Churchill cobbled together. …
I don’t see how anyone can realistically expect Bush to change course at this late date. It wouldn’t be “resolute,” in his understanding of the word, to acknowledge that he made a terrible mistake. What he can do instead is play for time and hope for some sort of deus ex machina that miraculously saves the day.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/09/AR2007070901398.html