Is the United States still looking for this man?
More than six years after the 9/11 attacks, the United States still does not have a coherent plan to destroy a key staging area for terrorist attacks into the country, according to an independent government watchdog.
Still, the administration's answer to this "clear and present danger" is to send more aid to Musharraf and trust that he will take care of our problem for us. We are still farming out the battle to Muslim generals who in spite of the diplomatic rhetoric and posturing clearly do not have our best interests at heart.
The strategy is at odds with the Bush doctrine of preemption. The head of the CIA has now verified that at least a remote part of Pakistan -- essentially a break-away Islamic province -- is harboring America's Enemy No. 1 and presenting a direct and urgent threat to the homeland.
Instead of carpet-bombing the terror camps and safe houses there (as opposed to the occasional drone-fired missile), we're playing a dangerous game of wait-and-see. If we have intelligence specific enough to know the type of terrorists al-Qaida's training along the Pakistan border, why aren't we acting on it?
This GAO report may be the most damning condemnation of the Bush administration's counter-terrorism efforts. The report goes on to say that the Bush administration has failed to develop any plan to address the Al Qaeda threat. Worse, the report finds that Al-Qaeda is now able to attack the United States and represents the "most serious" threat to this country.
The report's opinion of the Bush administration efforts speaks for itself. Not only have we not met our goals but we have no plan to meet our goals. Al-Qaeda can now attack the United States. Al Qaeda in Pakistan is the most serious threat. Al-Qaeda is using the Pakistan tribal areas to put the finishing touches on its plans to attack the United States.
It is really not a good thing to have incompetent people running this country.
Director Kimberly Peirce and actor Ryan Phillippe might be talented, but audiences don't want to see their latest movie.
Kimberly Peirce’s “Stop-Loss” is the best fictional film yet inspired by the Iraq war … or at least it’s in a dead heat with “In the Valley of Elah” for that honor. Which doesn’t mean “Stop-Loss” will be any more successful at the box office than its predecessors. As of late Saturday night, "Stop-Loss" was performing poorly.
Undoubtedly, being stop-lossed has to suck something fierce, and I feel for the thousands pulled from their lives and loved ones for a contractual obligation they’re well aware of but probably never imagined would be brought to life. But they deserve better than this. Stop-Loss is Exhibit A -- no, D -- no, J in the case proving Hollywood can’t stand the troops. This insistent portrayal of these men and women as unstable and dangerous -- dehumanized and psychotic -- is outright stereotyping and the building of a stigma. It’s a monstrous act performed by these filmmakers and yet they remain undeterred even by box-office humiliation in their cruel objective to lose a war by tearing down our finest.
Are audiences suffering from war fatigue, as many have suggested? Do they have little interest in following a war on the big screen when they are surrounded by images and stories of it on the small screens in their home?
Moviegoers will not leave their homes unless they're being offered something in the theater they cannot find elsewhere, and what is notable about many of this year's political films is that very few of them actually stand up as triumphs of cinematic art and storytelling. In many respects, the greatest risk of making political art during wartime is that heightened political passion will trump artistic judgment, which in the case of moviemaking means that expressing a political stance will take precedence over character development and plot structure.
Saddam Hussein's statues fell, but the bloodshed hasn't stopped.
Five years ago this week, the United States introduced "shock-and-awe" to Iraq, drove Saddam Hussein from power, and began a years-long occupation and counter-insurgency operation that Pentagon planners did not fully anticipate. Five years on, some 4,000 U.S. troops are dead, tens of thousands more have been injured, millions of Iraqis have been displaced, and the fighting continues.
Yet there has been progress, too. Little by little, in places like Anbar province, Iraqis are beginning to see a normal life without terror or intimidation. And Iraq may yet be a strong U.S. ally in the Middle East.
Was it worth it? Is Iraq a central front in the war on terrorism? And if victory is not at hand, what should victory look like? Above all, when and how should the war end?
We're five years into the war in Iraq now. Nearly 4,000 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed. Thousands more Americans and Iraqis have seen their lives shattered in what became the premier killing zone of a global war. But death and combat no longer make the front pages; the drama has been bled out of it, and the war has taken a back seat in the presidential campaign. Rather than maturing in time of war, the American people seem eager to put it out of mind.
After 1989, we were encouraged to believe that war was history. This illusion made the shock of 9/11 all the worse. Even then some people wanted to believe it was an aberration, something we had brought on ourselves and could fix with kind words and deeds. The ease of the Taliban's ouster then created the false impression that we had managed to reinvent war in a more palatable form. In fact, all we've managed to do as a nation over six-and-a-half years of war is confuse ourselves.
Iraq has been, first and foremost, a strategic miscalculation based on a disastrously wrongheaded conception of the strategic challenge revealed on 9/11/01.
The United States had a chance to implement a focused, disciplined effort to go after al-Qaeda and remove the threat but instead George W. Bush, aided and abetted by a wide swathe of elites, chose to go in for a broad-brush vision of a "war on terror" whose centerpiece would be the invasion and occupation of a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and no meaningful relationship with al-Qaeda. The costs of that decision have been enormous, not just in terms of the tragedy that's played out for American soldiers and Iraqis of all stripes, but in terms of the opportunity cost of totally reorienting America's foreign policy and defense priorities away from useful things and toward Iraq instead.
The image of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr looms over a book shop in Najaf.
For the last six months, Muqtada al-Sadr has helped reduce violence in Iraq -- his Shiite cleric's self-declared cease-fire order to his Mahdi Army made life much easier for American troops patrolling the streets of Baghdad. One estimate said the cease-fire reduced violence by 60 percent. But that relative peace may soon end.
Sadr has threatened to lift the cease-fire by the end of the week. His followers have become restless as U.S. troops have conducted raids against alleged breakaway factions of the Mahdi Army backed by Iran.
Sadr's decision to either continue or end the cease-fire has serious implications for his political movement. Ending the ceasefire puts him in the crosshairs of the US and Iraqi military, and expose the depth or shallowness of his support in the Shia community. This would also risk any remaining goodwill that exists in the Shia community, which has enjoyed the recent reduction in violence and has become increasingly hostile to the activities of the Mahdi Army.
Understanding the deal the U.S. has made with Sadr is key to understanding what the surge strategy is really all about, and why treating the surge as representing any kind of "success" for the Iraq war is a bit like celebrating winning twenty dollars at blackjack right after having lost a thousand at poker.
In exchange for Muqtada's cooperation in reigning in the more extreme elements of his militia and his help in reducing violence from staggering to merely unacceptable levels, the U.S. has effectively ratified his control of a large, formerly mixed areas of Baghdad, secured his position as arguably Iraq's most popular Shi'ite political leader, and consigned thousands of Iraqis to life under a proto-state regime of religious fundamentalism that is about as authoritarian as Saddam's was, but with the added bonus of no liquor, no movies, and with women forced to veil themselves and and prohibited from skilled professions. And, as a double-bonus: This regime is oriented toward Shi'ite Iran.
On patrol -- permanently?
The Bush Administration is negotiating with the Iraqi government to keep U.S. forces in that country after the U.N. mandate expires. Critics say such an agreement will force the next president to keep following Bush's policies; the administration disputes that notion, and says it won't submit the agreement to the Senate for ratification.
What is certain is that next January U.S. forces will still be deployed in Iraq in large numbers. Securing the conditions by which they can drive out al Qaeda and tame the Shiite militias, deter Syria and Iran, and guarantee Iraq's integrity and freedom would be a worthy legacy for this Administration, and a useful inheritance for the next.
The whole idea of the deal—and its timing—is to tie the hands of the next president. It’s true that the president won’t formally be constrained, particularly if the deal won’t be subject to Senate approval. But diplomacy is funny thing.
At the very, very least, Bush’s successor faces an uphill battle to undo the bilateral deal—and that’s before the Iraqis start griping about the U.S. not keeping its word and the domestic press runs with that storyline. And, fundamentally, that’s exactly why the Bush administration is negotiating this deal before leaving office.
