Letters to the Editor
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@jpincus
He said that progress has been made in Iraq, THEREFORE the new front is in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
I beg to differ. Afghanistan is the original front. We went there because that's where Osama was based. We almost caught him, but we screwed up and went off to pursue a neocon fantasy in Iraq. Osama got away, and now appears to have set up shop in Pakistan, which is a country that has nuclear weapons.
There is no credible evidence that "al-Qaida in Iraq" even existed prior to our invasion. If al-Qaida was operating in Iraq, it was almost certainly because they wanted to bring down Saddam and replace him with an Islamic theocracy. We've already done half of that job for them, and we've also turned Iraq into a marvellous recruiting and training area for al-Qaida.
Your interpretation of Crocker's comment seems to be that we've almost finished defeating an enemy that we either created or helped establish, and after five years of jerking around in Iraq we are finally remembering who the real enemy is.
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Have a happy War on Terror
The War on Terror is a meaningless slogan. Where's the central front for the war on mindless slogans?
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Crocker Did Not Upset Anything
Just because al-Qaida may be currently a greater threat in Afghanistan doesn't mean that Iraq is not the "central front in the War on Terror". I don't know if Iraq is but Crocker did not admit that it is not.
Isn't there more to the War on Terror than just fighting al-Qaida? Back in the early stages of this "war" Liberals (like me) expended a great deal of energy arguing that the war had to be fought in a number of ways (politically, militarily, culturally), not just militarily against al-Qaida.
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What Terrifies You?
The things that terrify me are only tangentially connected with Al Qeda and Islamic extremists. High on my list of terrors is that the United States will permanently lose its status as a "free" country, that we will all be under virtually constant surveillance by government and corporations, that our elections will continue to be shams, that our elected (or "selected") representatives will fall further under the sway of lobbyists, that our chief executive will continue to style himself as an authoritarian "decider", and that our media will continue to be more exclusively propagandistic rather than critical and informative. I consider this threat to be several thousand times more likely to happen than an invasion of the United States by radical Islamic forces.
Very close to this terror of the atrophy of our democratic institutions is the terror of social dislocation consequent to the declining availability of cheap petroleum. Our food production and the physical infrastructure supporting our economy is based on the ready availability of cheap energy. I do not see the political leadership of this country embracing the magnitude of this looming crisis or mobilizing our resources to meet it.
Instead of addressing the very real terrors that face our nation as a whole or the terrors many of us face in relation to personal issues, such health insurance costs, we find our attention and wealth diverted into chasing will-o-the'wisps in a land that is literally on the other side of the planet. We need someone to stand up and point out the folly of the "terrors" we have been told to fear, but which are in fact almost inconsequential, and focus attention on those concerns that really do threaten our culture and our lives.
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@futhark
Damn straight.
The American colonists revolted because they were fed up with being subject to the whims of an asshole named George. A lot of them died to win our freedom, and they went on the write a constitution that was designed specifically to prevent a repetition of the problem they fixed.
Now, the neocons would have us believe that it was all a mistake, and that we'd be better off with an omnipotent ruler who can do whatever he wants. It may be just a coincidence that the current poobah is another asshole named George.
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Rhetoric
It is not a question of giving the "right answer." It is about the truth.
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@ plumb bob
"And Salon has demonstrated yet again that Democrats are simply incapable of thinking past their own facile talking points."
You forgot to mention how Iraq attacked us on 9.11. And, your projection is showing; might want to do something about that...
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@jpincus
"Liberals have either gotten used to finding fault where no fault exists or forgotten how to analyze texts properly. Either way, the article's conclusions are wrong and its arrogant pronouncement about the Bush administration is contradicted by the Ambassador's own statement."
I disagree. The real problem lies with the fact that the Bush administration has misrepresented the war from the very beginning. I'm not going to waste time and space listing all of the instances of the egregious lies, it's all well documented. Conservatives have to accept the fact that the lies of Bush administration are viewed by most of the nation, and the world at large, as systemic and not the result of a few individuals. The short, sad answer is that, regardless of the personal veracity of the General or the Ambassador, they work for an administration with no credibility and no amount of hairsplitting is going to change that.