Comments on: Global War On Terror no more

By: Peter Hughes

Peter Hughes — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:40:40 +0000

#19 – And once again, the Nutty Yankee proves that BDS is still alive and well in the Baracula reign.

Regards,
Peter H.

By: The Livewire

The Livewire — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:14:31 +0000

and bnl gets enough lithum in him to post!

guess what, bin laden has bin decomposing for a while. We’ve also gone 8 years w/o an attack on our soil. Meanwhile President Obama is offering his hand to the Mulahs who sent explosives and supplies and trainers to kill our troops, wants to reach out to ‘Moderate Taliban’ (they only stone you half to death! they let their women read to the third grade level!) and Sec of State Hillary Clinton tells China we don’t care about Human Rights anymore.

Immoral? Look in the mirror, if you can stand the sight.

By: buckeyenutlover

buckeyenutlover — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 21:03:47 +0000

too bad the immoral bushco admin didn’t actually nab bin laden when they could have.

By: Scottland

Scottland — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 18:57:34 +0000

Dude, it’s like, Filter city here. Population: ME.

FILTERED.

By: Scottland

Scottland — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 18:56:48 +0000

Vanessa, please understand that my criticism of the war has little, if anything, to do with individual soldiers following orders, and everything to do with an executive response to assessments of threats to our collective security.
I lived with a marine for a year, who was at the battle of Falluja. He was a young father from Alabama, and I was pained at how much he had suffered in combat;shellshocked, sleepless nights from mortar fire, anger and resentment from Iraqis who he genuinely thought he was helping, the lost final moments with his father, who died while he was in combat.

It was morally confused for the American government to ship him to Iraq, on the most manufactured of pretexts (and no matter how you want to present the buildup to war, any war, you cannot deny that there is a historic, systematic approach to the politicization of intelligence by all governments) when he could have been deployed elsewhere,or raising his son. If your boyfriend lost a limb or suffered brain damage in his attack, then I could call it criminal negligence of the US government that it poured such valuable dedicated resources in the wrong place, if I was so inclined. I could call it obscene, even, that the government that your boyfriend and my housemate worked so hard to secure for the iraqi people may well be a puppet for Iranian influence, if you look at the political parties that the Bush Administration have helped install.

Doesn’t the whole thing just seem crazy to you?

By: Vanessa

Vanessa — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 18:33:43 +0000

#5: I’ll have to tell my boyfriend who was injured in Iraq by a “human caused catastrophe” (aka crazy man with bombs strapped to him) that the building of all of those roads/schools/houses by him and his fellow soldiers was “moreally confused” and all of the donations of generators/food/supplies to the Iraqis were “criminal.”

Shame on him. And shame on George Bush for approving the funding to allow it!!

By: Roberto

Roberto — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 17:21:18 +0000

The phrase, The War On Terror may soon be back in vogue as the Taliban laugh in the face of Obama. As each day goes by he validates the criticism from conservatives during the campaign. BruceÂ´s comment; Â¨We will rue the day we go back to the September 10th-Clintonian mindset,Â¨ could very well be prophetic.

By: Scottland

Scottland — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 14:27:46 +0000

I think that, on the issue of honesty, Bush was not being dishonest (in that I think he believed what he was saying), but certainly disengenous about the nature of the ‘war on terror’, in particular the notion that morality in terrorism is a strict ‘with us or against us’ binary.
I cite, as an example, the 1996 Khobar towers bombing referenced in a previous post. A terrorist attack against a target housing US military personell in Saudi Arabia, it was believed to be an attack sponsored by the Iranian regime. Continuous intelligence gathering and assessing by CIA and DIA had located potential weaknesses in security, intelligence operations by Iranian agents. Even with all this data, the Saudi’s refused to press charges against Iran, claiming that all the attackers had been saudi nationals. SA and Iran were in a period of political reconciliation, and the Saudi government did not want to jepoardize that. This did not, of course, stop the USA from working with and providing military and economic support to the Saudi government. We are fighting terrorists, but the ways that governments need to respond to their threat is much more nuanced than a declaration of war would suggest.

By: ILoveCapitalism

ILoveCapitalism — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 13:48:21 +0000

By invading (under U.N. auspices) and nation-building in a key few of the failed states that harbor the people who practice the tactic, thereby denying safe haven to the people who practice the tactic and enlisting locals in the fight against those people. In other words: exactly what Bush attempted, and partly succeeded in doing, in various countries including Afghanistan and Iraq.

I’ll give you the following: “The War on Terror” is indeed a poor name for the war. It doesn’t name the real enemy, or the real nature of the war. The real enemy is Islamo-fascism, or more broadly, Islamist expansionism: Islam’s need to conquer the world. And the war is defensive on our part: modern Islamo-fascists have been at it for over 3 decades, and Islam has been at it (world conquest) for 14 centuries, and is unique in being a religion born in events of killing and conquest. Which is why they call it a “Religion of Peace”: to hide the truth. But I digress. The point of Bruce’s post, I think, is that even the super-lame name for the War on Terror that we already had (“War on Terror”) is too honest for the Democrats; even the lame fig-leaf of partial honesty that we had, is now being abandoned.

By: The Livewire

The Livewire — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 11:25:00 +0000

Scottland,

Interesting post. I’ll hit a few points that I either know data on or question.

1) The accounts of ‘we left them detailed plans’ has been refuted by the Bush Admin several times. It’s a ‘he said, she said’ arguement. Where is the paperwork? Maybe down Sandy Burger’s pants?

2) Which budget is that? My understanding of the budget process is that ‘Bush’s first budget’ would have been July/August of 01.

3) bin Laden has bin decomposing for some time. And with 3 successful elections, a rebuilding government, and a functioning police/army I don’t think you see the same Iraq that the rest of us do. DC is more dangerous than parts of Iraq. Should we withdrawl from there?

As to the Iran connection, sources I’ve read, including Michael Yon, seem to indicate that the Iraqi people don’t want the Iranian influence either.

Not to change the topic, but the current administration’s policy of ignoring huamn rights violations and asking Iran to stop blowing up our troops is going to be sooo much better…

By: George

George — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 03:08:56 +0000

One can go after (but not have a “war on”) “terrorISTS”, but not “terror.” How does one have a war against a tactic?

By: ILoveCapitalism

ILoveCapitalism — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 01:24:07 +0000

…and, since terrorists are trans-national and move from nation to nation, one can therefore never war on them at all, even if they are warring on us. An approach to terrorism that leaves us defenseless. Crazy Uncle Ron strikes again.

By: George

George — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 01:01:18 +0000

As Ron Paul has said, one cannot have a war on a theory. There cannot be a war against “terror” anymore than one could have a war against “peace”. You can only conduct a war against an enemy nation.

By: Scottland

Scottland — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 23:40:44 +0000

OMG, massive amounts of filter.

By: The_Livewire

The_Livewire — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 23:35:41 +0000

These ‘over motivated, oppressed individuals’ with their acts of ‘manmade disasters’ will result in excessive ‘collateral damage’ while engaging in ‘protected speech’.

By: Sean A

Sean A — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 20:50:42 +0000

As a continuation of my comment #2:

The Pakistani Taliban claims responsibility for the violent assault on the Pakistani police academy and promises an attack on Washington that will “amaze everyone in the world.”

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,511740,00.html

And what does our Secretary of State do on the SAME DAY? Why, extend the olive branch to the savages of course!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090331/ts_nm/us_afghan_conference

There’s no sugar-coating this. Because of this Administration’s policy of appeasing our enemies, many Americans will die.

By: ILoveCapitalism

ILoveCapitalism — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 20:49:39 +0000

Hey, speaking of terrorism, moral equivalence, etc…. HotAir has video of Christopher Hitchens confronting and Salman Rushdie confronting them on the Bill Maher show:
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/03/30/video-the-excruciating-hitchens-confronts-mos-def-about-al-qaeda-clip/

By: ThatGayConservative

ThatGayConservative — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 19:31:40 +0000

Isn’t Westerner a subjective term? After all, eventually everybody’s west of somebody else. But then I blew a Geography test bonus, in 6th grade, by answering the question Where is the Middle East with Out East.

Anyways, I’m sure Chairman Obama would welcome our Islamo-fascist overlords as an opportunity to rescue his downward spiral.

By: eaglewingz08

eaglewingz08 — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 17:22:48 +0000

“Westerners” is such a ‘divisive’ term, you should instead be using the term ‘pre-conversion muslims of countries which are yet to be converted to the ROP’

By: Scottland

Scottland — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:08:30 +0000

argh, it was filtered, but lets see if i can condense what I just wrote
Been reading a lot about clinton anti-terror policy, was pretty coherent, not perfect, but really did understand the nature of the threat. Dick Clarke and Andy Lake big cheeses in counter-terror w/ clinton.
Bush, lots of money in anti terror related things, really given america’s standing in the world a drubbing, and the end product of this outlook, in places like iraq, is (as Juan Cole explains):
In the Iraqi elections, Shiite fundamentalist parties closely allied with Iran came to power. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, the leading party in parliament, was formed by Iraqi expatriates at the behest of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1982 in Tehran. The Islamic Mission (Daâ€™wa) Party is the oldest ideological Shiite party working for an Islamic state. It helped form Hizbullah in Beirut in the early 1980s. It has supplied both prime ministers elected since 2005. Fundamentalist Shiites shaped the constitution, which forbids the civil legislature to pass legislation that contravenes Islamic law. Dissidents have accused the new Iraqi government of being an Iranian puppet.

This is the result of bush’s outlook? the architects of our enemies organizations coming to power through the tools of democracy that we’re paying for?