Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Next attack

Avedon wrote on Atrios Shouldn't it concern us that Republicans are constantly talking about how people will all wise up when the next terrorist attack at home comes?
Certainly the fecal matter will hit the revolving blades (the s#@t will hit the fan).
I mean, they really seem to be looking forward to it, and they take great delight in the thought that, by God, people will see things differently when it happens.
Actually they wonder what the NYT will do to try to cover for the Dems stupidity. Especially if their building is hit this time.
They relish the thought. They hunger for that terrorist attack they need to save their Party.
Or maybe for something that will absolutely destroy the Dems.
I, Not Atrios, think Democrats would be wise to talk on TV about how the last thing we need is to put people in power who have such a stake in having terrorists attack Americans.
Oh please, Br'er Fox, please don't throw me in that briar patch. I would love to see the Dems take that position. Even a left wing commentator would have to mention that we had not been attacked for five years, and ask whether the Dems really don't want to fight the Islamoterrists in Baghdad and Basrah and would they prefer Boston, Baton Rouge, Birmingham, Bismarck, Boise, Buffalo, Broken Arrow, or Beaumont; not fight them in Mosul and would they prefer Miami, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Mobile, Memphis, Muskogee, or Mesquite; not fight them in Karkuk and Karbala and would they prefer Kansas City, Knoxville, Ketchum, or Kilgore; not fight them in Tall Afar and Tikrit and would they prefer Tulsa, Tallahassee, Tampa Bay, Terre Haute, Toledo, Topeka, Tucson, Tahlequah, Texas City, or Texarkana..

5 comments:

LT said...

Well, you sure cleared that up, Don. Especially with the "No, we only hope it kills Democratic Americans" thing.

What an intellect.

Don Singleton said...

Never said I hope it kills anyone. Just said Dems would find it difficult to explain bringing death to our shores

Anonymous said...

"Actually they wonder what the NYT will do to try to cover for the Dems stupidity. Especially if their building is hit this time."

Aw, a slut Coulter reference. Gee, aren't you smart?

Once again. bin Laden has not attacked because GWBush has done such a great job terrorizing Amercians since. Why waste your ammo when your enemy is so busy shooting himself in the foot?

Anonymous said...

Ok, maybe we should take this into consideration;

[...]The report by Chatham House, the Royal Institute for International Affairs, released on Wednesday entitled "Iran, Its Neighbors and Regional Crises" concluded that there was "little doubt" that Iran had been the "chief beneficiary of the war on terror."

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1154525933195&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter

The Taliban have regained control over the southern half of Afghanistan and their frontline is advancing daily, a group closely monitoring the Afghan situation said in a report Tuesday.

The report on the reconstruction of Afghanistan marking the fifth anniversary of 9/11 is based on extensive field research in the critical provinces of Helmand, Kandahar, Herat and Nangarhar.

"The Taliban frontline now cuts halfway through the country, encompassing all of the southern provinces," the Senlis Council report says. The Senlis Council is an international policy think tank with offices in Kabul, London, Paris and Brussels.

The report from Senlis, which has reported extensively on Afghanistan over recent years, says also that "a humanitarian crisis of starvation and poverty has gripped the south of the country." The report blames "the U.S. and UK-led failed counter-narcotics and military policies" for this situation..

"The subsequent rising levels of extreme poverty have created increasing support for the Taliban, who have responded to the needs of the local population," the report says.

"We are seeing a humanitarian disaster," Emmanuel Reinert, executive director of The Senlis Council told IPS. "There are around Kandahar now camps with people starving, kids dying almost every day, and this is obviously used by the Taliban to regain the confidence of the people, and to regain control of the country."

The U.S.-led nation-building efforts have failed because of "ineffective and inflammatory military and counter-narcotics policies," the report says. "At the same time there has been a dramatic under-funding of aid and development programmes."

The disastrous policies could have created the very circumstances for a growth of terrorism that the United States set out to fight, the report says. "The U.S. policies in Afghanistan have re-created the safe haven for terrorism that the 2001 invasion aimed to destroy," Reinert said.

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=34603

An alternative way to handle islamist extremism;

Al-Qaeda has a China problem, and no one is watching. Despite al-Qaeda's significant efforts to support Muslim insurgents in China, Beijing has succeeded in limiting popular support for anti-government violence.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/IB27Ad01.html

Although;

What comes to mind when someone mentions intelligence and the Iraq war? Why, of course, the US intelligence estimate on Iraqi unconventional-weapons programs that was excoriated in a 500-page report that the Senate Intelligence Committee issued with much fanfare in July 2004, was further torn apart in another 500-page report by a presidentially appointed commission, and has been the object of scorn and vilification ever since.

But the weapons estimate was one of only three classified, community-coordinated assessments about Iraq that the US intelligence community produced in the months prior to the war.

Don't feel bad if you missed the other two, which addressed the principal challenges that Iraq likely would present during the first several years after president Saddam Hussein's removal, as well as likely repercussions in the surrounding region. After being kept under wraps (except for a few leaks) for more than four years, the Senate committee quietly released redacted versions of those assessments on its website on May 25, as Americans were beginning their Memorial Day holiday weekend.

I initiated those latter two assessments and supervised their drafting and coordination[...]

Opposition to the war among many at home and abroad who shared the misperceptions about Iraqi weapons programs demonstrated that those perceptions did not, contrary to the Bush administration's enormous selling effort, imply that a war was necessary.

In contrast, the other two assessments spoke directly to the instability, conflict, and black hole for blood and treasure that over the past four years we have come to know as Iraq. The assessments described the main contours of the mess that was to be, including Iraq's unpromising and undemocratic political culture, the sharp conflicts and prospect for violence among Iraq's ethnic and sectarian groups, the Marshall Plan scale of effort needed for economic reconstruction, the major refugee problem, the hostility that would be directed at any occupying force that did not provide adequate security and public services, and the exploitation of the conflict by al-Qaeda and other terrorists.

[...]
The story of these prewar assessments has other implications that are at least as important, however, including ones for the current debate over Iraq policy. The assessments support the proposition that the expedition in Iraq always was a fool's errand rather than a good idea spoiled by poor execution, implying that the continued search for a winning strategy is likely to be fruitless.

http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IF12Ak01.html

Anonymous said...

Terrorist attacks are used as pretext for measures and actions that are not effective, or even meant to be effective, in preventing the next terrorist strike. The actions taken are in fact based on geopolitical assessments that have NOTHING TO DO with preventing the next attack, as the Iraq-war so clearly have shown. If you read the above post and the links, especially the last one, this is very hard to deny. Iraq is, today, the best breeding ground for new terrorists that al-Qaida ever had since the Soviet-Afghan war ended, and this was PREDICTED before the war by american intelligence. At the same time no-one seriously believed Saddam to be any real threat to either the US or Israel (I mean the "we can´t wait for the smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom cloud"-bit was such obvious BS, and let´s not get into the Niger-documents again...) and STILL they went ahead and invaded, KNOWING the terrorist threat to the US would INCREASE! They don´t care about the people killed, another attack, to them, is just an excellent opportunity to attack Iran.