In the Daily Beast last week, Bruce Riedel, who served for years as a CIA analyst on the Middle East, wrote an important article with the dramatic headline, "Al-Qaida is back." Riedel, who today works for the Brookings Institution, was taking a position against the conventional wisdom, that was widely heard in Washington prior to the 2012 elections, that the U.S. had al-Qaida "on the run". Riedel's claim was based on his examination of the outcome of a coordinated attack by al-Qaida's Iraqi affiliate against two high security prisons, which led to the escape of at least 500 al-Qaida members.
In breaking into the Abu Ghraib and Taji Prisons, al-Qaida used mortars and suicide bombers. According to its own account, its forces detonated 12 car bombs. The Iraqi Army proved to be useless as it failed to stop the assault. Former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq James Jeffrey was quoted in The Wall Street Journal saying that if al-Qaida could "take down Abu Ghraib," it could also "take down the Green Zone in Baghdad", where the U.S. Embassy was located.
Related: "A year ago Obama said al-Qaida is on the run, and now WE are on the run"
h/t Frank
Yeah well, the Green Zone is a security zone....a layered defence zone (or it was)....a fortress.
Prisons are not fortresses although the venerable ones were often originally fortresses. The transition to prisons and the purpose built prisons are designed to keep people in not out....and are usually not very defensible. The successful storming of the Bastille, by the Paris mob, is a classic example.
“Gosh, what did America do to get so many people mad at them? Didn't their current President get a Nobel Peace Prize?”
It's Bush's fault.
Or Chaney...the..Tea Party gun owners ...old white people...
( /S )
the current lefty attitude is run and hide. the attitude should be hunt them down and dispose of them. even in America and Canada the lefties do not like self defense. we might just dispose of one of the criminals that need removal from our society.
Too many of the Lefties live "charmed," aka hallucinatory, lives, far from the madding crowd. I've found with this bunch -- and I know far too many of them -- that with financial "security," they write their own narrative because they're above the fray. Reality doesn't impinge on their lifestyles; they're doing just fine no matter who's in office at any level of government. They can criticize a Stephen Harper or a Rob Ford because Harper's or Ford's policies which benefit middle- to lower-income Canadians are off their radar. The only "help" they want from government are perks for themselves -- and too many of them have arrived at financial independence by slurping at the public trough.
How long they'll be above the fray now that the Obamanation's turning the U.S.A. into a blubbering, cowardly international sell-out and a financial basket case stateside is another question. Reality might smack them upside the head when it turns out that the Obamessiah is actually the Destroyer.
I can barely believe the chaos and havoc Zero's administration is wreaking on the Western world -- and that it's not being stopped. It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
Well, we are toast either way. The entitlement crowd, unfortunately, has enuf votes to keep a socialist liberal sob in office. Plus we have the blacks voting multiple times and at least 11 million illegal Mexicans voting. Times are a changing, most of us Tea Partier types are just digging in now, saving and hoarding everything we can get our hands on, and preparing for the worst. Because you know, if Hillary can run that means Michelle can run.
Good one batb.
Obama is proving he is in over his head, we need to be concerned, the entire Western world needs to be concerned. He's a glaring example of the wrong person at the wrong time to be Commander in Chief.
[Under Obama] ... instead of the new birth of hope and change, it is the transformation of a constitutional republic operating under laws passed by democratically accountable legislators into a servile nation under the management of an unaccountable administrative state. The real import of Barack Obama’s political career will be felt long after he leaves office, in the form of a permanently expanded state that is more assertive of its own interests and more ruthless in punishing its enemies. At times, he has advanced this project abetted by congressional Democrats, as with the health-care law’s investiture of extraordinary powers in the executive bureaucracy, but he also has advanced it without legislative assistance — and, more troubling still, in plain violation of the law. President Obama and his admirers choose to call this “pragmatism,” but what it is is a mild expression of totalitarianism, under which the interests of the country are conflated with those of the president’s administration and his party. Barack Obama is the first president of the democracy that John Adams warned us about. ...
... Barack Obama isn’t the leader of the free world; he’s the front man for the permanent bureaucracy, the smiley-face mask hiding the pitiless yawning maw of total politics. ... The president not only ignores the law but in some cases goes out of his way to subvert it.
President Obama’s lawlessness is as bland and bloodless as the man himself, and practiced openly, as though it were a virtue. ... Barack Obama’s administration is unmoored from the institutions that have long kept the imperial tendencies of the American presidency in check.
https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/353797/front-man
Good find,batb.Problem is,how many of the sheeple who really need to read and understand the article,can?
CAGW/climate change/whatever,nuclear war,Al Queada,etc. are not the greatest threat to our grandkids.Plain,common stupidity is.When a kid cannot give me 10 cents change from a five on a 4.90 bill,without a calculator,we are fubared.
Nice that you quote the statement by Bill Kristol at the bottom of your post, Kate.
One of the major cheerleaders of the Iraq War, one of the great triumphs of recent times! What glory it has brought to the United states! And you know, oil profitspaid for it all!
With your Mensa status, I can sure see why that would appeal to you, Kate!
Oh, and Batb and others? The 'conservative' movement is anything but, and regards you all as merely suckers.
They laugh as they roil up your racism, homophobia, and meanspiritedness in order to get your votes - and then do everything they can to destroy the middle class and make the wealthy wealthier.
Like P.T. Barnum says, there's one born every minute...
Nice work, Kate!
batb, I agree with the tenor of the NR picece. I was hoping Obama would contain/deter the radical elements within his party. Instead he has jumped in with them with nonsensical remarks around the Trayvon incident and evaluating a pipeline on how many jobs it creates.
Obama has a poor understanding of Islamism and its hatred of the US and its people. They wish for nothing less than forcing a siege mentality upon the modern world, such as Israelis now experience. Thinking killing Bin Laden fatally weakened AQ is naïve in the extreme for two reasons: he represents a struggle that has been ongoing since the times of Abraham and certainly since Muhammad. the present AQ leader Al Zawahiri is the operational brains behind the operation and favoured more widespread attacks against fellow Muslims as well as western targets.
By killing Bin Laden the US may have inadvertently caused a ramp up of AQ operations, an unintended consequence. Nonetheless AQ will continue their savage campaign to install their vicious ideology worldwide no matter what the civilized world does about it.
It will take an internal revolution within Islam to rid itself and the world of AQ - that seems impossible now.
So joe.. your point is what?
Ignore joe...trolls are a dime a dozen,according to their math.
Oh and by the way, Kate you're right.
Bin Laden *is* dead.
Obama killed him.
Your pigeon-chested cowardly effete son of privilege Bush couldn't kill him in 8 years.
Obama did it in 3. That's what a real man is capable of.
While you guys spent all those years cheerleading whatever war your masters lied you into. What lemmings, what spineless 'good Germans'.
Hey guys - wanna try thinking for yourselves once every so often? Might be kinda taxing since your brains aren't used to it - but hey, why not give it a whirl before you destroy the entire planet?
Hm? ;)
Well said on all accounts. We now live in a world of unaccountable political elites.
That will not last. It never does,
Entropy is an unforgiven sort.
http://www.screedofmomus.info/2011/08/moral-degeneracy-of-elite.html
Obama is a postmodern agnostic par excellence. But like so many schooled in post-modernism and cultural relativism, he has an immediate and intense enmity for anything that smacks of imperialism — and an equally intense desire to be seen as supportive of (although certainly not to live like) the downtrodden of the Earth.
http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2013/08/04/why-the-administration-lied-about-benghazi/
Which leads us back to Benghazi. You don’t have to be Muslim to love the Muslim Brotherhood or even, consciously or unconsciously, sympathize with the goals, if not the actions, of al-Qaeda. You just have to have been imbued with a blind hatred of imperialism. That’s all you need.
-
For the life of me I still do not understand why Obama, Schilley and others lied to us about Benghazi, video riot. 'uh yeah.'
this roger Simon essay explains some of it but you and I know something is still missing.
Anyone that discovers the full truth will be a rich man/woman because I would pay good money to read the real reason..
future print
Obama and the truth behind Benghazi-
book value 59.95..
another troll trying to float from the bottom of the toilet bowl.
By killing Bin Laden the US may have inadvertently caused a ramp up of AQ operations, an unintended consequence.
The problem wasn't from killing BL, but rather it was the stupid arrogance of Ø gloating about it to the media. The smart thing to do would have been to kill BL and then say nothing about it. But then the Yanks no longer have a reputation of doing the smart thing, and more often it's the opposite.
In breaking into the Abu Ghraib and Taji Prisons, al-Qaida used mortars and suicide bombers. According to its own account, its forces detonated 12 car bombs. The Iraqi Army proved to be useless as it failed to stop the assault. Former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq James Jeffrey was quoted in The Wall Street Journal saying that if al-Qaida could "take down Abu Ghraib," it could also "take down the Green Zone in Baghdad", where the U.S. Embassy was located.
So all that time and money spent building up the Iraqi state was as big a waste as I thought? This is where Kate and others like her think US forces should still be.
As long as AQ is off fighting other regional governments and not us so much, there's not much problem.
If someone can't argue a point objectively and can instead only name-call, then it merely demonstrates that they don't know what they're talking about.
I was hoping Obama would contain/deter the radical elements within his party.
- Shamrock
That's the strangest sentence I've read in a long time!
I don't think I need to elaborate.
So all that time and money spent building up the Iraqi state was as big a waste as I thought?
It was more of a diversion to keep people distracted from learning about the military bases KBH was building in Iraq.
L-ass
until they win a big fight and wind up with nukes at their disposal, then my stooped little friend, U'd better run and hide
and wind up with nukes at their disposal... Posted by: NME666
They've all got "nukes at their disposal". What do you think happened to all those missing nukes when the Soviet Union collapsed? Anyone who has money and wants a nuke, has a nuke.