Iraq Withdrawal: A Feith saving exercise?

In today's Whitehouse press briefing Dana Perino tried to justify President Bush’s escalation in Iraq by stating,

“The terrorists that are seeking a safe haven in Iraq, if we were to leave, would find one, just like they had one in Afghanistan.”

Yes Dana, that's the foothold they grabbed whilst he U.S. was too busy establishing a "beachhead" in Iraq to tackle Iran!?

I'm just wondering what part of the recent Senate Intelligence Committee findings regarding Hussein's Prewar Ties To Al-Qaeda Dana Perino missed?

Are we being asked to have Feith or save Feith?

Yvonne Ridley: Believe it or not

I Listened to Islamic fundamentalist Yvonne Ridley's interview by Jane Cowan on Radio ABC this morning where Jane's dogged questioning of "...do you or do you not support suicide bombing?" finally achieved a terse and exasperated "Of course I don't" response from Yvonne.

At first I thought that this was just another case of Muslim baiting so I decided to investigate further by visiting Yvonne's website, specifically her Speech at the 2006 Global Peace & Unity Conference where she said:

"Our greatest shame has been our silence while martyrdom operations ...have been condemned as acts of terror as witnessed in 9/11..."

In truth I think these words speak more to the mind of Yvonne Ridley than her public effacing reply to Jane in her radio interview. That's not to say of course that the question wasn't loaded to some extent.

To explain, dead civilians are dead civilians whether the delivery platform is an Israeli M16, a U.S. cluster bomb or a Palestinian freedom fighter with a bomb strapped to his chest. I don't imagine civilians have an opinion about how they are killed except to say that they would in the main prefer not to be. Governments have armies to protect the civilian population against attack from others but these same armies are also well placed to conduct acts of oppression on their government's behalf including the careful filtering of media access to the results of those activities. The oppressed on the other hand are usually poorly resourced and are, for the most part doomed to failure when confronting a well trained and resourced military in a conventional sense.

Subsequently, the oppressed have little choice but to visit their pain and suffering upon the oppressor's civilian population with the aim of subjecting them to the same sense of fear and hopelessness that left unchecked will ultimately catalyse them also to rise up.

Faced with terrorism then, all governments will face the choice of escalating their response to counter any groundswell of public fear and unrest a la Saddam Hussein or choose negotiation with their terrorist opponents as in the case of the Provisional IRA.

Neither solution is palatable to some but accept it or not the oppressed are never going to give up--they have nothing to go back to.

9/11 - Buck Passing American Style

I just read a September 2006 Interview With the New York Post Editorial Board and Condoleezza Rice, where they asked her if she was calling former President Clinton a liar when he said that the Bush Administration "didn’t even try to go after al-Qaida" prior to 9/11. She responded:

"I would just suggest that you go back and read the 9/11 Commission report on the efforts of the Bush Administration in the eight months, things like working to get an armed Predator that actually turned out to be extraordinarily important..."

I thought what good idea! I'll read the report. Sure enough, The 9/11 Commission Report Executive Summary states:

"The CIA also produced a plan to improve intelligence collection on al Qaeda, including the use of a small, unmanned airplane with a video camera, known as the Predator."

Imagine my surprise then, to read a report of former White House Counter Terrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke's 9/11 Commission testimony specifically the reference to his damning memo to Rice, blasting the CIA for blocking the predator program.

No wonder he resigned. It must be bad enough having to fight assholes who want to terrorize your country while a willfully deaf, dumb and blind Administration remains incomprehensively fixated on it's own selfish and partisan objectives.

As Clarke stated in his testimony:

"...all of the things we recommended back in January were those things on the table in September. They were done ...after September 11th. They were all done. I didn't really understand why they couldn't have been done in February."

Well Richard, that's because Bush & Co. used those eight months to plan Operation Pork-barrel in Iraq.