I agree with Jonah:
While I don’t subscribe to so-called ass-brained theories that Bin Laden never existed, I am coming around to the view that he’s dead as Michael Ledeen has suggested. I mean why wouldn’t Bin Laden issue a video for the five year anniversary of 9/11?
I agree with Jonah:
While I don’t subscribe to so-called ass-brained theories that Bin Laden never existed, I am coming around to the view that he’s dead as Michael Ledeen has suggested. I mean why wouldn’t Bin Laden issue a video for the five year anniversary of 9/11?
I agree with Jonah:
While I don’t subscribe to so-called ass-brained theories that Bin Laden never existed, I am coming around to the view that he’s dead as Michael Ledeen has suggested. I mean why wouldn’t Bin Laden issue a video for the five year anniversary of 9/11?
Hitchens says that it will get worse before it gets better (particularly because we don’t seem to be able to unite before the enemy), and it’s too early for commemorations:
The time for commemoration lies very far in the future. War memorials are erected when the war is won. At the moment, anyone who insists on the primacy of September 11, 2001, is very likely to be accused–not just overseas but in this country also–of making or at least of implying a “partisan” point. I debate with the “antiwar” types almost every day, either in print or on the air or on the podium, and I can tell you that they have been “war-weary” ever since the sun first set on the wreckage of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and on the noble debris of United Airlines 93. These clever critics are waiting, some of them gleefully, for the moment that is not far off: the moment when the number of American casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq will match or exceed the number of civilians of all nationalities who were slaughtered five years ago today. But to the bored, cynical neutrals, it also comes naturally to say that it is “the war” that has taken, and is taking, the lives of tens of thousands of other civilians. In other words, homicidal nihilism is produced only by the resistance to it! If these hacks were honest, and conceded the simple truth that it is the forces of the Taliban and of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia that are conducting a Saturnalia of murder and destruction, they would have to hide their faces and admit that they were not “antiwar” at all.
Steven Den Beste has related thoughts.
We can have a war on drugs (which is absolutely unwinnable) or a war against the Jihadis, but it’s nuts to think that we can have both.
Want a criticism of the Bush administration? Here’s one: the blindness of the drug warriors is appalling, and has set us back dramatically in the real war.
Four-hundred-and-forty-one years ago:
The lessons for us today, almost five centuries hence, are equally important. The same enemy exists today. Instead of galleys he uses airliners, and instead of Janissaries he uses suicide bombers. He hates and fears western civilization, and seeks to convert or enslave us. We have to meet him and engage him everywhere he is, just as the Knights did. What it will take to win against him is what it took to win at Malta: preparation, skill at arms, leadership, and above all faith and an iron will.
This has truly been a long war, and no immediate end is in sight.
Terrorism is not a leading cause of death. As Tierney notes in his column today (subscription required):
Outside of Afghanistan and Iraq,
He gives Khatami exactly the amount of respect he deserves:
Governor Mitt Romney today ordered all Massachusetts state government agencies to decline support, if asked, for former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami
Gerry Adams is meeting with Hamas.
Reminds me of the old joke about the guy walking down the street in Ulster, when he feels the barrel of a gun against the back of his neck.
“Now would you be Protestant, or would you be Catholic?”
Thinking quickly, he says, “I’m a Jew!”
There’s a pause, and then, “Begorrah, and I’m the luckiest Palestinian in Belfast.”
And then there’s the variation.
“So, then would you be a Protestant Jew, or a Catholic Jew…?”
I’m sure that any minute, we’ll see editorials railing against radical Islamists about this:
FAR-RIGHT extremists have adopted the tactics of Islamic jihadis by posting videos on the internet in which they threaten to behead British Muslims.
The films show balaclava-clad white British men brandishing guns, knives and clubs, calling on all Muslims to leave Britain or be killed. One appears to be a soldier who has served in the Gulf.
In one film, a man tells Muslims to “go home” or risk being burned alive. He threatens, “I’ll cut your head off”, and claims to have “comrades” across Britain who have “had enough”.
Any minute now.
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