This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Terror War

  • Newsweek: We overreacted to 9/11

    Tim HetheringtonFareed Zakaria wrote for Newsweek an article entitled “What America Has Lost“, but the url tells us that the original title was “Why America Overreacted to 9-11”

    In the article, HetheringtonFareed Zakaria wrote;

    Since that gruesome day in 2001, once governments everywhere began serious countermeasures, Osama bin Laden’s terror network has been unable to launch a single major attack on high-value targets in the United States and Europe. While it has inspired a few much smaller attacks by local jihadis, it has been unable to execute a single one itself.

    Smaller attacks? Influencing the Spanish election with terror causing the Spaniards to withdraw from the war is smaller? That’s HUGE for a supposedly small terror group. And HetheringtonFareed Zakaria admits that it’s because the world took “serious countermeasures” that al Qaeda is unable to launch a similarly large attack like 9-11 – so how is that overreacting?

    In every recent conflict, the United States has been right about the evil intentions of its adversaries but massively exaggerated their strength. In the 1980s, we thought the Soviet Union was expanding its power and influence when it was on the verge of economic and political bankruptcy. In the 1990s, we were certain that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear arsenal. In fact, his factories could barely make soap.

    Remember the media estimates of 10,000 US casualties that never materialized based on nothing in particular except their own desire to scare the crap out of Consumer America? Yeah, it’s much better to underestimate enemies. We’re dealing with a military genius here.

    So after the first page of this garbage, HetheringtonFareed Zakaria wrings his hands over the size of the government after 9-11 – in particular the Homeland Security Department. If i remember correctly, George Bush just tried to keep Homeland Security a seat at the cabinet table and it was the Democrat Senate which demanded an accountable Department instead.

    So HetheringtonFareed Zakaria calls for an end to the war to cure this growth of HSD. The war on terror would be over by now if these numbnut armchair generals and philosophers would shut the Hell up for one minute.

    Is there any doubt left in your mind why the Washington Post sold Newsweek magazine for a dollar?

    Thanks to ROS for the link.

  • Muslims: Will we ever belong?

    The New York Times is tearful over the treatment of Muslims in this country. The single act they have to use as an example is the attack on a Muslim cab driver in New York by a liberal film student. Some how that single attack reflects the constant danger in which millions of Muslims live every day.

    “We worry: Will we ever be really completely accepted in American society?” said Dr. Ferhan Asghar, an orthopedic spine surgeon in Cincinnati and the father of two young girls. “In no other country could we have such freedoms — that’s why so many Muslims choose to make this country their own. But we do wonder whether it will get to the point where people don’t want Muslims here anymore.”

    Eboo Patel, a founder and director of Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based community service program that tries to reduce religious conflict, said, “I am more scared than I’ve ever been — more scared than I was after Sept. 11.”

    Yeah, when you can count attacks on Muslims in this country on more than one finger, I might worry with you. When the attacks continue when you start informing police about potential terror plots, I might be concerned for you. When the Muslim community condemns terror and terror’s supporters as a single, united voice and you still live in fear from liberal film students, I’ll stand with you.

    Until that time, you reap what you sow.

  • al Sadr back to threatening the Iraq government

    Muqtada al-Sadr, the “maverick” Shi’ite cleric (I think “maverick” in Iraq means “unable to find a good dentist or a personal trainer”) is rattling his rusty saber once again to put a damper on President Obama’s announcement that US forces have ended combat operations in Iraq.

    From his cushy apartment in Tehran where he’s been hiding since the surge began and wiped out the troops al-Sadr abandoned with “fight to the death” orders, Mookie, as he’s affectionately know at TAH, feels safe enough to warn Iraqi forces from working too closely with US troops.

    In a statement read at Friday prayers in mosques across Iraq, Muqtada al-Sadr extended support to Iraq’s police and soldiers, as long as they don’t fight alongside American forces.

    Anyone else think it’s coincidental that al-Sadr makes this threat just hours after Obama’s speech to the nation about Iraq?

    Oh, did I also mention that Iraqis claim to be a bit confused by that speech?

    Many people here say that they did not expect Obama’s declaration to sound so final or that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates would acknowledge that the war is over, albeit “clouded” by its start in a U.S.-led invasion based on a false premise.

    “I’m disappointed by this new administration,” Othman said. “They want to run away from Iraq.”

    I suppose Mookie figured that was his cue make himself known again. Naw, a solid timetable withdrawal is an excellent strategy that works every time…oh, wait, that’s not right.

  • Dry run interdiction

    Two men were arrested in Amsterdam after they completed an apparent dry-run at our transportation security;

    No one’s saying, but I’m guessing they’re members of the Seventh Day Adventist terrorist group Saturday Sabbath.

  • Latest message from the land of Rainbows and Unicorns.

    I really have a strong love/hate relationship with this group. On one hand I respect that while other people talk about what is going on in Afghanistan they are there and have been for quite a while. They are trying to help by talking to the population to give a connection to the people outside of Afghanistan. But that is where the respect ends.

    On the other side they have managed to do nothing productive besides making feel good videos with such generic like “Why not love”. Think Bobby Whittenberg without the anger management issues. Todays videos are no exceptions.

    To make matters worse and more insulting is that JTC has been working with people that have not only not using him as a way of finding out how to have a direct impact on Afghanistan with needed supplies and other items, but actively ignored it. Preferring to make stories about how nothing we are doing is working and indirectly giving press to the Taliban. Yes DC am talking to you on this one.

    Stop making the risk that these people are taking in vain and get a program started to see that they are not just wasting their time and health.

    Like now, yes you Rethink Afghanistan, get off your computer and do something about this.

  • Peace with Honor Reloaded.

    Well at least people are starting to think about what happens with Afghanistan when we leave. The bad part it is just a re-visited plan used over 35 years ago.

    How to Leave Afghanistan Without Losing

    I am going to start were it goes wrong.

    In conjunction with the disengagement process, the agreement would set in motion U.N.-brokered peace negotiations. The Taliban has long demanded a disengagement timetable as the precondition for peace. Ironically, however, its emotional appeal comes primarily from its role as the standard-bearer of opposition to foreign forces. Thus, when and if the United States does present a timetable, it will be cut down to size. The Taliban will be in a strong bargaining position, but only as the dominant force in the ethnically Pashtun south and east of the country.

    The focus of peace negotiations could then be redirected from the terms for power sharing with the Taliban in Kabul to the nature and degree of the power to be ceded to the Taliban in its Pashtun strongholds.

    Yea except for one minor problem, the Taliban does not share power. Feels like a bad pun off of Lord of the Rings.

    This approach is likely to get Pakistani blessing as the best deal available under present circumstances. Islamabad’s leading strategist on Afghanistan, former Foreign Secretary Riaz Mohammed Khan, suggested such a shift in focus in a Washington meeting on June 17, observing that the Taliban has “important regional influences where they should be accommodated.”He specified Khost and Paktia as examples of provinces where Taliban control might have to be accepted, and he implied that Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistan’s Army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, had explored such arrangements in their two Kabul meetings in early June.

    Yea, it gets better.

    The provinces under Taliban rule would have a significant stake in stable relations with Kabul as a source of foreign aid for dams, roads, and other economic infrastructure projects.

    Yea like they are doing a great job of that now.

    Afghanistan’s neighbors would be more likely to help contain the Taliban under a U.N.-brokered agreement than under wartime conditions in which they want to avoid identification with an unpopular U.S. military presence.

    Of course they are because they know the UN is not going to do a thing no mater how may times they break the agreement.

    But lets not forget the real danger, out of control Generals.

  • Mission in Iraq changes…not so much

    Stars & Stripes challenges the general impression that combat operations will end in Iraq.

    More than a few U.S. soldiers said they were offended by the implication that the danger somehow vanishes when Operation Iraqi Freedom becomes Operation New Dawn.

    “I guess that means we’re not going to get blown up anymore,” was the deadpan response from 1st Lt. Ryan McAlister, with the 1st Battalion, 64th Armor Regiment, who commands a rough-hewn U.S. outpost near Mosul.

    The news has been confusing for both troops and some in the U.S. awaiting their loved ones’ return from war.

    “I had to tell my folks to cancel a welcome home party,” said Cpl. Felmen Spencer, 26, of Jacksonville, Ark., who is also with the Apache Troop.

    His parents thought the announcement meant he would be coming home immediately.

    The what the Hell did Joe Bite-Me mean when he said “politics, not war has broken out in Iraq” to the VFW Convention two days ago? I guess Bite-Me’s job is to be a cheerleader for all of the fumbles of this administration. That’s not spin, it’s outright lies.

    The only thing that has changed is troop levels, meaning less troops are facing the same amount of danger in outlying areas.

    Even the Associated Press has noticed a rise in attacks on Iraqis since the absence of US troops is noticable;

    Bombers killed 53 Iraqis in nearly two dozen attacks spanning the country Wednesday, mostly targeting security forces in seemingly coordinated strikes the day after the number of U.S. troops fell below 50,000 for the first time since the start of the war.

    Insurgents have been stepping up their attacks on Iraq’s security forces in recent months as the U.S. has trimmed its military presence in the country. At least half of those killed — 30 — were Iraqi soldiers and policemen.

    Funny how the warnings of a timetable turn out to be true. I hear there are plans to have Joe Bite-Me sing us all to sleep every night.

  • Timetable encouraging Taliban?

    Our military leaders speculate in public whether or not the timetable withdrawal from Afghanistan give “sustenance” to the Taliban, like Marine General James Conway in this BBC report.

    Meanwhile reports are coming out of Afghanistan this morning that 40 (MSNBC‘s Number) and 59 (CNN‘s number) schoolgirls and their teachers were the target of some sort of noxious gas this morning in Afghanistan;

    Ultra-conservative elements in Afghan society oppose female education and have a history of setting fire to girls’ schools, threatening teachers and attacking students. Some even earn money for doing so. Although these extremists aim to terrify girls back into isolation and ignorance, many young women refuse be intimidated.

    In 2001, only 1 million Afghans were enrolled in school, all of them boys, The New York Times reported. Today, approximately 7 million Afghan children attend school, of which 2.6 million are girls. However, schools for girls still remain closed in Taliban strongholds, particularly in southern and eastern Afghanistan.

    Attacks like this one are on the rise because it’s easier to terrorize schoolchildren than it is to terrorize US military forces and the timetable withdrawal is tantalizingly close.