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Thanks to all those who responded to my post The Gulf Wars in Hindsight (see above); I appreciate the dialogue; however, I was really hoping for my own insight and benefit to hear from more soldiers who participated or are still active in the Iraq and Afghan wars; Their feelings and perspectives are the ones I wish to know and think on; any of you out there, please share at length. I understand you are all honorable and follow orders as good soldiers, but I would like to know your thoughts on the war, in retrospect. Thanks to all.

The captain of a Continental 737 that ran off a Denver runway in December 2008 as winds gusted up to 45 knots probably could have kept it on the runway if he had applied enough rudder at the right time, the NTSB said in its final report on the accident on Tuesday. However, the board also said that if the crew had been given better wind information before trying to take off on Runway 34R, they might have delayed departure or requested a different runway. Air traffic controllers provided all the weather data that was required, telling the crew winds...

The Bush campaign has hammered away at John Kerry as an incorrigible flip-flopper, but hasn't said enough about a related Kerry vice: His tendency to be a Monday-morning quarterback who offers up 20/20 hindsight as though it were wisdom and foresight. Consistent with the Democratic party's love for liability law, Kerry is a stereotypical ambulance chaser. He waits for something to go wrong — the war in Iraq, the shortage of flu shots at home, anything — and then leaps forward to criticize and to smugly insinuate that he "would have" done better. "When it comes to Iraq," Kerry declared,...

Over in the alternative universe of the 9-11 Commission hearings watched only by me, Richard Ben-Veniste recently proposed an amazing new standard for investigating Arabs in this country. In the middle of haranguing Condoleezza Rice, Ben-Veniste demanded to know why the suspected 20th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, had not been more aggressively investigated, despite the fact that – I quote – he had "no explanation for the funds in his bank account, and no explanation for why he was in the United States." So let me get this straight: Airport security can't acknowledge that a person is an Arab, but they...

Does the White House acknowledge mistakes? They would be crazy to offer up talking points to the Democrats, but my impression from such contacts as I have is that senior people in the Bush administration regret a short list of tactical errors. One of them is certainly the emphasis they placed on over-specific "WMD" charges before the invasion. But they don't regret having tried to walk their argument through the United Nations, and they remain more charitably disposed to that organization than, for instance, I am. Indeed, they are all ears for the proposals Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N.'s point man...

National security has been the core of President Bush's appeal to the public since 9/11. So it's no wonder that the attack on the Bush record by Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism adviser to four administrations, has inspired such a furious response. But the issue is too grave to be met by assaults on Clarke's integrity or by his attacks on Bush. It's the evidence that counts. Clarke has two substantive criticisms. First, the new administration was slow to come up with a plan for dealing with the terrorist threat before 9/11. Second, the decision to go to war against Iraq...

(1010 WINS) (New York) -- Former New York city mayor Rudy Giuliani says laying blame for missed clues that could have signaled the 9-11 terror attacks is ``Monday morning quarterbacking.'' Giuliani, who was New York's mayor when terrorists hijacked the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center, said that for any one thing to jump out, you almost have to know what's going to happen in the future. Giuliani is scheduled to testify next month before the government commission investigating the terrorist attacks. Giuliani spoke to The Associated Press in an interview before a public appearance to announce a...

So Clinton couldn't bomb Islamic terrorists but he could bomb Christian Serbs? Tim Russert devoted an hour to interviewing former White House counterterrorism official Richard Clarke.  But some controversial claims that go to the heart of Clinton's so-called "war on terrorism" were unchallenged.  One was Clarke's claim that Clinton didn't bomb al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan because "there were lots of other things going on in the world…"  Clarke claimed that Clinton "had the Middle East peace process close to an agreement.  He was bombing in Serbia.  He was bombing in Iraq.  In retrospect, with 20/20 hindsight, people now understand...

Americans hungry for a mistake-proof party uncompromisingly resolute on national security now have found one -- the pre-9/11 Democrats. Created in hindsight and forged in recrimination, the pre-9/11 Democrats are unwilling to let any obstacle stand in the way of their defense of the American homeland. Who knew contemporary Democrats could so readily combine the toughest aspects of J. Edgar Hoover and Douglas MacArthur?    The pre-9/11 Democrats, as portrayed by their reaction to the work of the 9/11 Commission, are not plagued by niggling civil-liberty concerns. They were willing prior to 9/11 -- or so they imply now -- to...

Don't look now, but the oh-so politically correct New York Times has just endorsed racial profiling as a critical tool in fighting the war on terrorism. In fact, says the Times, if only President Bush had ordered airports to use "threat profiling" to screen out suspected Muslim terrorists after receiving a CIA warning in August 2001 that al Qaeda was preparing to hijack U.S. airplanes, the 9/11 attacks might have been prevented. "After receiving that briefing memo entitled 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.'," says the Times in Monday's lead editorial, Bush should have departed from his vacation...

<p>Think for a moment about a few of the most important decisions you've made in your life.</p> <p>Maybe to accept a job offer. Invest your life savings in a new business. Or, on the personal side, whether to end a relationship, get married, have an abortion.</p>

WASHINGTON -- The month-long series of Congressional intelligence hearings that ended this week produced a detailed and disheartening portrait of the U.S. spy community as it groped its way toward Sept. 11. It also reshaped thinking about the most basic lingering question: could the attacks have been prevented? For months after Sept. 11, the answer, high-level government officials insisted, was no. The new answer is that preventing or disrupting them certainly seems to have been possible. "It really is impossible to say whether the attacks would have been stopped," Eleanor Hill, staff director of the inquiry, said in an interview...

The National Commission on Terrorist Acts Upon the United States ostensibly has been exploring how the deadly Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks could have happened and how they could have been prevented. In light of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's testimony Thursday, I, like so many others, have figured out an easy answer: Get the panel to construct a time machine so that all those geniuses who now believe that Sept. 11 easily could have been averted can wave a magic wand and reinvent the past. That's sort of what is going on anyway. Some commissioners seem to have forgotten what...

The leaders of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks agreed Sunday that evidence gathered by their panel showed the attacks could probably have been prevented. Their remarks drew sharp disagreement from one of President Bush's closest political advisers, who insisted that the Bush and Clinton administrations had no opportunity to disrupt the Sept. 11 plot. They also offered a preview of the difficult questions likely to confront Condoleezza Rice when she testifies before the panel at a long-awaited public hearing this week. In a joint television interview, the commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor...

he terrorist strikes of Sept. 11, 2001, could have been prevented had the United States government acted sooner to dismantle Al Qaeda and responded more quickly to other terrorist threats, the chairman of the commission investigating the attacks said today, even as the White House sought to dispel the notion that the attacks were avoidable. Advertisement Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the commission and former Republican governor of New Jersey, said that had the United States seized early opportunities to kill Osama bin Laden in the years before Sept. 11, "the whole story would've been different." Mr. Kean's comments on...

Through all of last week's finger-pointing over how "government" failed to prevent 9/11, there was little credible discussion about what would actually have stopped the attacks. If the diplomatic and military actions by both the Bush and Clinton administrations were insufficient, as the commission studying the terrorist attacks concluded, then what would have been sufficient? If Richard Clarke, the fatuous opportunist and former anti-terrorist czar, was so certain that everyone else (except himself, that is) blew it, then what was his plan? When infrequently asked, his answers were incoherent, incomplete, impractical or evasive. For the sake of ending this national...

NEWSWEEK reporting in fresh editions; The 9/11 commission is likely to conclude the attacks could have been prevented by the simple act of sharing information. In Phoenix in July 2001, an FBI agent wrote a memo warning that some young Arabs taking flying lessons might be terrorists. Had that warning made it to Clarke's counterterror shop, airlines might have begun bolting cockpit doors. But the commission doesn't want to make government bureaucrats even more risk-averse by hounding them.

NEWSWEEK reporting in fresh editions; The 9/11 commission is likely to conclude the attacks could have been prevented by the simple act of sharing information.... Had that warning made it to Clarke's counterterror shop, airlines might have begun bolting cockpit doors. But the commission doesn't want to make government bureaucrats even more risk-averse by hounding them.

Memo Says U.S. Was Lax on Iraq; 'No One Was Paying Attention' to Arms [EXCERPT] The Washington Post R. Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post Staff Writer FIRST SECTION; PAGE A1 June 5, 1992, Friday, Final Edition A senior State Department official concluded in a secret memorandum after Iraq invaded Kuwait that "no one was paying attention" to blocking Iraq's purchase of Western equipment for weapons of mass destruction during the previous decade, according to a copy obtained by The Washington Post. [According to Clarke's memo,] "no one was paying attention" to blocking Iraq's purchase of Western equipment for weapons of...

Predicting the future can be tricky. That is because many of us have a hard enough time understanding the present. One hundred years ago this week, the New York Times wrote an end-of-the-year editorial summing up the most important events of 1903. It was a long, rambling essay that took up most of a page and attempted to cover every aspect of life from foreign affairs to industry and the labor movement. One section was titled, "Invention and Discovery." The author meandered for awhile about the discovery that year of radium and its possible benefits to mankind. Then, near the...

On October 9, 2003, the night before Rush Limbaugh came clean on his drug addiction, I posted the following vanity: With my flame retardant suit snugly on, I must ask if anyone else who listened to Rush today noticed that he seemed to be off his game verbally. Slurring words, using the wrong words incorrectly etc... I heard only the last hour of the show today and it seemed (to me) obvious. AND, it sounded much like he did before his hearing loss when he use to comment on people who'd call to complain that he sounded drunk. My wife,...

Sept. 11 could have been prevented only by having a principled foreign policy. The 900-page Congressional report criticizing the operations of the FBI and CIA in the months prior to the September 11 attacks misses the fundamental point. Whatever incompetence on the intelligence agencies' part, what made September 11 possible was a failure, not by our intelligence agencies—but by the accommodating, range-of-the-moment, unprincipled foreign policy that has shaped our government's decisions for decades. September 11 was not the first time America was attacked by Islamic fundamentalists engaged in "holy war" against us. In 1979 theocratic Iran—which has spearheaded the "Islamic...

<p>Thanks to a new Congressional report on 9/11, we now know much more about the terror network behind that attack -- and the intelligence shortcomings that failed to stop it. But even with the benefit of hindsight and an exhaustive, yearlong investigation, huge pieces of the 9/11 puzzle remain missing. Which ought to remind us that Presidents responsible for protecting American life and liberty must often act on imprecise information.</p>

The following are predictions made by politicians and commentators at home and abroad regarding the likely course of the war in Iraq. Some were made before hostilities broke out on March 20 and some around March 30, when the rapid US advance towards Baghdad paused on the Euphrates river.The commentators The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, in The Telegraph Nov 5, 2002: In 1939, we risked our own lives and safety in resisting a tyranny. In this instance, we are more likely to risk the lives of hundreds and thousands in a region that could rapidly spiral down into...

The coming Bush landslide Politics/Elections Front Page Opinion (Published) Keywords: IT WON'T BE A LATE NIGHT ON NOVEMBER 7TH. IT WON'T EVEN BE CLOSE Source: National Review Author: Joel Rosenberg Put a fork in it. Gore's campaign is done. The media's conventional wisdom is wrong. It won't be a late night on November 7th. It won't even be close. The hedging, bobbing, and weaving from the political punditry is mere psychological projection that Gore still has a chance. He doesn't. Swing voters and swing states are beginning to break for Bush. Voter turnout and intensity favor Bush. Internal divisions within...

May 20 — If only the Bush administration had heeded a 1999 Library of Congress report on The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism, the latest terrorist strike against the United States need never have happened. In that report, experts commissioned by the National Intelligence Council outlined “New Forms of Terrorist-Threat Scenarios.” From that discussion and clues in other government reports, the FBI, the CIA, and the White House could have pieced together and averted the deadly plot that has since unfolded.THE PLOT to which I’m referring, of course, is last week’s suicide bombing of an U.S. Navy destroyer docked in...