It’s always been the ISI. Letting Pakistan get nukes was a strategic blunder of the first order.
[Update early afternoon]
Mark Steyn: The wages of weakness.
It’s futile to be fighitng in Afghanistan when our enemies there are merely puppets of the real problem across the border.
…was penetrated.
It’s good to know that, amidst the TSA follies and other stupidities of the past decade, some people in the government were doing some things right.
…and the Muslim rape culture. This is a very politically incorrect article.
And in related news, here comes the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. This may be playing out as Israel’s nightmare.
[Update a while later]
Will the Muslim Brotherhood succeed where bin Laden failed? As Michael Totten writes, “The gradualists–not moderates, but gradualists–in the Brotherhood do have a greater chance of success. Unlike the vicious psychotics of Al Qaeda in Iraq, they won’t alienate their soft supporters until it’s too late.”
Actually, as noted, I think this is just another way to express anti-Americanism.
[Update a few minutes later]
Speaking of which, I give you Michael Moore, educating us unwashed types on true patriotism.
…or at least, if not there, bin Laden’s ideas were born in the West.
Not surprising, really. Most ideas that kill millions were born in the West. The West has nurtured both great good, and great evil.
For example, where do you think that Pol Pot got his ideas? In Cambodia? Nope. In Paris. Just the place to marinate in the moldering monstrous themes of Rousseau and the Terror.
While Marx was a westerner, he fermented his deadly memes and wrote his most damaging works in London, a city that has had Marxists as mayor in recent history. Even Mao, perhaps the greatest mass murderer in history, was influenced by him.
What is particularly poisonous about radical Islam is how it has wed the ancient warmongering of Mohammed with more modern totalitarianism (though in a sense, you could say that Mohammed, with his intrinsic melding of religion and state, invented totalitarianism), and how comfortable the left seems to be with it, decrying “apartheid” in Israel, a nation that has Arabs in its legislature, while ignoring the true gender apartheid of the Arab culture. The alliance between the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and national socialism in Germany during the war was not isolated, or a coincidence.
[Via Ed Driscoll, who has more links]
That’s how Obama got bin Laden. It is one of the ironies of history that it’s Richard Nixon’s name on the plaque at Tranquility Base, because he happened to have become president a few months before the flight. Of course, it would be a stronger analogy if bin Laden had been captured two years ago.
The Washington Times is wondering the same thing I did:
All of this goes to show that President Obama is walking a fine line in what he wants two different groups to understand about bin Laden’s burial. There are those who question why a millionaire mass murderer who was disavowed as practicing a reputedly inauthentic version of Islam received an Islamic funeral. Sea burial itself is an American honor for which only service members, their dependents or outstanding U.S. citizens are eligible. This group is to trust that the decisions made by the Obama administration are the correct, “appropriate” ones and stop asking impertinent questions.
Meanwhile, the other group is subtly being courted with the emphasis on “conformance to Islamic requirements” throughout administration briefings. By reiterating, as Mr. Brennan did at least seven times in his Monday briefing, that the burial was done according to Islamic requirements, he has communicated that the President is more concerned about placating the feelings of Muslim extremists than closure for the American people. Families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks who want to see photos of bin Laden’s corpse must be satisfied with a presidential victory lap at Ground Zero, while radical Islamists can be comforted by Mr. Brennan’s repetitive assurances that the burial was conducted according to rites with which they’re familiar—ones which inherently confer dignity and respect to the dead.
I’ve had three radio interviews on this subject this week (including one at 6 AM this morning).
Thanks, main-stream media!
Jay Carney says that bin Laden wasn’t a Muslim leader?
Well, he seems to have been a leader, so is he saying that he wasn’t a Muslim? These people are tying themselves up into logical knots.