Posted on 08/27/2005 4:51:10 AM PDT by snarks_when_bored
Big PING for later reading. This guy is great.
I'm REALLY proud my Country stands next to you in Iraq.
Thanks. This is a great piece.
I'm REALLY proud my Country stands next to you in Iraq.
As a person of Italian ancestry (on my mother's side), I'm pleased about it, too.
Best regards...
For later reading. Must work. Baby needs new shoes.
Hitch ping
Bookmarking
I am sitting here stunned. This is not an easy article to read, but it is a fantastic article and explains what for me has always been unexplainable. Why the president does not more clearly lay out the facts about the Iraq/AQ connections.
This should be copied off and plastered to the inside door of every bathroom stall at Foggy Bottom and the CIA.
Mr. Hitchens opens up a giant can of whoop ass BUMP!!
I agree with you mewzilla. This is one of the better articles I've seen in a long, long time.
This should be higher on Hitchens list. As in all wars, there is no substitute for the knowledge you gain of your enemy as when locked in combat.
Without the lessons & intelligence gleaned from Afghanistan and Iraq... we would be no more aware of the Islamo-fascist mind than we were on 9/12/2001.
" Coexistence with aggressive regimes or expansionist, theocratic, and totalitarian ideologies is not in fact possible. One should welcome this conclusion for the additional reason that such coexistence is not desirable, either. "
The entire "lessons learned" history of the 20th Century in two simple sentences.
What else really needs to be said?
I am sitting here stunned. This is not an easy article to read, but it is a fantastic article and explains what for me has always been unexplainable. Why the president does not more clearly lay out the facts about the Iraq/AQ connections.
A good question. This administration sometimes seems to take the 'never complain, never explain' adage a bit too far.
Bookmarked.
The reality is that the evidence for the Saddam-AQ connection is circumstantial. And some of the "hard" evidence, like a certain memo, has been dismissed as a fraud by the media who have a corrupt stake in not blowing their own cover of cooperation with the forces of evil.
For the casual citizen of this country, the evidence will have to be overwhelming and undeniable before the media will concede defeat in its project of ending the loss of power of their side (the Democrats allied with the forces of world wide socialism and communism).
President Bush does bring up these points, but he is drowned out by the drum beat of whatever talking points the NY Times, etc. have dreamed up for the day or week or month.
And he goes on the road and gives speeches all the time on his policies and actions and their justifications, and all you see on the tube is a small, soundless, slow motion bit of the president while a large polished dedicated socialist talks in front of and over him with the NY Times slant on the event.
We are facing dedicated, vastly experienced, and very smart traitors here in this country.
The battle here is every bit as serious and life-threatening for our country as the world wide battle against Islamofascists.
This goes unreported and unremembered, but it is as big as any other on his list.
Though I disagree on the wisdom of arming why Arab who showed up claiming to be an "ethnic Albanian" in Bosnia and the subsequent, US/British led victory for al Qaeda and "Greater Albania" (still no mass graves over there and our troops are STILL not home) it was otherwise well said.
In defense of the Bush administration and DoD though, I need to point out that some administration and military officials HAVE been telling the blunt truth all along. The media does not report these statements, because they don't fit the Quagmire status quo.
For example: In answer to the zillionth's question about how many American troops must die and Iraq's readiness to take over it's own security so we can leave, Col. Myers pointed out at over 2000 Iraqis have been killed by "insurgents" - in other words, more Iraqis have died defending their country from terrorists than have American troops. No mention was made anywhere in the media that I found.
This leads me to a pet peeve: the administration's capitulation on the term "insurgent". The definition of "insurgent" is someone who is fighting the government of THEIR OWN COUNTRY. Some of the terrorists in Iraq killing Iraqis and coalition troops are Iraqis, but most are from Iran, Syria, Saudi, Egypt, Pakistan, the PA territories etc. They are NOT "insurgents" they are INVADORS. In fact, though some locals joined forces with the foreigners, only a few targets have been officials of the new government. The rest have been local police and civilians.
People might argue that we invaded first. Yes, we did. The fact NOW is that the bulk of the Iraqi people want us to stay. One poll showed that 2/3 of the people of Baghdad want our troops to stay until the security situation is cleared up.
The whole administration needs to stand firm against the redefinition of "insurgent" by the left because it implies that the Iraqi people are the ones killing their countrymen and coalition troops, which creates public confusion about whether we're winning, whether we should pull our and whether this is The Next Viet Nam.
During the runup to the two Gulf Wars everyone, whether they were "for" or "against" war with Iraq, took for granted that Iraq had chemical weapons, and perhaps worse. Some opponents of Gulf War I gave this as a reason to oppose invasion. I wonder how many of these people are now crowing that Bush "lied" about WMD's.
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