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.