Posted on 12/21/2001 4:56:18 AM PST by vrwc54
WASHINGTON – The mountains of Tora Bora remind me of giant anthills. On the surface, arid soil. Underneath, a maze of tunnels, in which al-Qaida fighters scurry around like angry soldier ants, defending the queen from invading forces.But the queen, Osama bin Laden, has escaped the nest and may live long enough to recolonize and spawn new anti-American terrorist cells.
If we don't find bin Laden soon – and chances are slim that we will, since we don't have a clue where he is right now – blame our commander in chief and his politically correct war.
As I opined in this space Nov. 7, President Bush chewed up the precious first three weeks of the war courting and dining Muslims.
That worked swell: They stole and poisoned our food; aided and abetted the Taliban; burned Uncle Sam in effigy; aired bin Laden propaganda videos; and refused to let us use their air bases. They even named their babies Osama.
Meanwhile, their hero found better places to hide.
Phase 2 enlisted Muslim surrogates to fight our war for us. That worked great, too. After taking the booty, they let our enemy – but apparently not really theirs – escape to Pakistan, along with his commanders. The Taliban leader, Mohammed Omar, also got a pass, after we foolishly let alliance leaders negotiate the terms of his surrender. Those terms included a new hideout and some 400 bodyguards.
Now we're entering Phase 3: Manhunt for the escapees. Only, American "infidels" won't be doing the hunting, and certainly not the killing. Since the quarry is hiding in another Muslim country, we'll rely again on Muslim surrogates to bag it.
Don't hold your breath. Many Pakistanis revere bin Laden and would jump at the chance to shelter him. And the same Paki military and intelligence agency that's supposed to be sealing off the border and finding escapees for us is largely pro-Taliban.
No matter. The ticker-tape parade is probably still in the works, same route as the Gulf war celebration. Another Mideast "victory" prematurely declared.
Face it, the Bushes, who have Arab oil interests, are the wrong people to be winning – I mean, really winning – Arab wars (and don't think Daddy's not in the loop this go-round). Being guilty rich white patricians, they're also petrified of being called bigots, thus the hypersensitivity to Muslims the world over.
Oh, I can hear the jeers now from the Bush cheerleading section: You're a jerk, Sperry, a naysayer, just like the rest of the liberal media. The Taliban used to control about 90 percent of Afghanistan. Now they're on the run. Dubya kicked butt!
Reality check: Scattering does not mean defeating. And on the run does not mean dead, or imprisoned, and not able to terrorize Americans ever again. Recall that Bushies also declared victory when Iraqi troops ran back to Baghdad. Ten years later, we're still talking about sacking Baghdad. Some victory.
The original goal of the war on terrorism was simply to kill the terrorists who killed us. Bushies are gloating over accomplishing a goal that was made up along the way. It never was about liberating Afghanistan and propping up a new form of government there – unless, that is, Bush and a certain Arab-American security adviser of his still have a secret interest in building an oil pipeline across Afghanistan. If you can find such an objective in Bush's speech to Congress, let me know. Otherwise, the administration is guilty of mission creep before even finishing the core mission.
As long as bin Laden and Omar remain at large and can issue fatwahs, we are still in danger. Until you see them dead or behind bars, hold the ticker tape.
As it stands now, all we've done is taken a stick and stirred up a big anthill halfway around the world, without killing the queen. We've killed a lot of worker ants, yes, but we've merely scattered their leaders. These terrorists are nomads. Pushing them out of Kabul hardly fazed them. Like ants, they can recolonize practically overnight.
If we don't let our own troops exterminate them – on the ground rather than from the air – they will recolonize; and like stirred-up red ants, they will be angrier than ever at the "Great Satan" and "infidel invaders."
So far, largely for political reasons, we haven't let our special forces do the exterminating, even though they've trained for this for years.
A reconnaissance specialist who just returned from Afghanistan told me that special ops aren't doing much more than tagging along with alliance forces and calling in bombing coordinates for them.
Mr. President, stop subcontracting out America's war. Set U.S. forces loose on those remaining unsearched Afghanistan caves and redoubts that may be sheltering Omar. And deploy them to those Pakistan border towns that may be harboring bin Laden.
It's a pleasant surprise to see that at least one other person on this board isn't a terminal Bush suck-up or Republican Party toady. Bush and Ashcroft have done more damage to this country in 11 months then Clinton did in eight years. Our economy is in the tank, we're spending money like there's no tomorrow, our constitutional liberties are under full-scale assault and we can't travel by air without undergoing an anal exam.
Thanks to Bush, our kindly government can now break into our homes without our knowledge, conduct warrantless searches, read our email and track our Internet habits, and jail us without an arrest warrant or access to legal counsel. The president's war on terrorism has morphed into a full-scale assault on our most cherished individual liberties.
Bush is a "moderate" globalist with strong ties to organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations. He has little respect for the U.S. Constitution that he swore to protect. Occasionally, he pays lip service to the "American way of life," but spends most of his waking moments undermining our constitutional freedoms and spending wildly (e.g., billions for "public education") from the public treasury.
Worse yet, he's an unrepentant war monger who seems bent on bombing any Islamic state that doesn't fuel our oil needs. His billion dollar military adventure in Afghanistan, which is the paradigm of "mission creeep," will come back to repay us in spades. In two months of helter-skelter bombing, he's managed to kill nearly 4,000 Aghan civilians, more people than died in the attack on the World Trade Towers. Not one of those innocent Afghan victims had anything to do with the terrorist attacks on the United States.
In his zeal to make war on terrorism, Bush himself has become a terrorist, inflaming anti-American passions throughout the Muslim world. The United States can't go around killing innocent muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Sudan (Clinton's famous cruise missile attack on an aspirin factory) and expect there to be no repercussions.
Based on what we've seen already, it's highly doubtful that freedom or commonsense will prevail under the current administration. Where's Ron Paul or Alan Keyes when you need him?
Absurd, both in comparing Bin Laden to Saddam and in predicting his "dangerousness." He is broken. If he gets away (a very UNlikely prospect) he will be hiding for the rest of his life in a hovel somewhere in the jungles of Malaysia.
It never ceases to amaze me to find so many on the Left and Right whose moments of greatest glee revolve around predicting failure and disgrace for their own country.
What's there to refute?
Sperry has an opinion, I have an opinion.
Sperry, like all the media second-guessers, has no idea how to conduct a war nor how to navigate in the world of politics.
His opinion of how to fight the war on terrorism is like mine: it may be interesting, but it's ultimately irrelevant.
Here's your lump of coal, and new Depends.
Happy Holidays!
The analysis would be equally effective grounded on the proposition that Bush is overly motivated by the desire to deal with this on a politically correct basis. He perceives that he has obtained some political benefit from his family's favorable relationships with Arab leaders (motivitated possibly not by the financial goals set out here but instead by other favorable dealings over the course of the last fifty years). He carried a significant majority of the Islam vote.
Whatever his motivation, I am not able to view the end result we now see as having done anything other than deny the enemy the use of Afghanistan as sanctuary baseing area--that is all we have accomplished and it has cost us a lot, economically, and in terms of commitment of personel. The end result leaves us exposed to the leadership and probably as many as 70,000 of the trained enemy.
The passions seem to have subsided now that the Muslim world knows how easily the United States military can crush them if they harbor those who would kill Americans.
I'd also like you to back up your absurd charge that 4,000 "innocent" Afghans were killed.
Hell, he PHYSICALLY got in the SinkEmperor's face!
I don't know about you, but for five years or so we had ants in our house, and antraps galore. The ants would disappear for a while, but they'd come back, time after time. Not until I found their nest, wiped them out, destroyed the nest, kilt the queen and her servants and rebuilt that part of my house as was needed to eliminate the leakage problem that allowed the ants to nest, did we eliminate the ants.
As of last week, we have only seen the temporary disappreance of the ants from finally setting out traps and destoying one nest. We were sloppy in destroying the nest -- the queen has escaped, it is likely.
..."White House sources say Clinton was so angry that he ordered IBD Washington bureau chief Paul Sperry banned from the White House, but backed off the demand once he calmed down.(http://www.capitolhillblue.com/Sept1999/092999/tempertantrum092999.htm)"It was an extraordinary loss of public composure for a man who has weathered much, much worse," says political scientist George Harleigh. "He apparently just snapped."
Clinton was smiling, shaking hands and socializing with reporters Friday night during the annual picnic for members of the White House press corps when a guest asked, "When are you going to have your next formal press conference, Mr. President?"
Clinton kept shaking hands and after a few moments said: "I don't know. I'll have one."
Sperry, one of the reporters, asked, "When?"
The president replied, "Why?"
Sperry replied: "The American people have a lot of questions about illegal money from China and the campaign-finance scandal."
Suddenly, Clinton's mood changed, his face turned red and he launched into an argument that lasted nearly 10 minutes as he defended himself and the Democratic Party against allegations of Chinese attempts to influence the 1996 U.S. presidential election...."
Oh yeah, like MurrayRATMom would want to hear from them...Catch a clue, just because you both don't like President Bush doesn't make her your friend.
My guess is that the President's team knows more than the public thinks they know. Maybe we don't, but if we do, don't expect our national security team to be telling the likes of Sperry. If he had his way, we'd be capturing Osama just after the Super Bowl presentation of the Publisher's Clearing House winner...
How about showing a graph of the DJIA since January 20? You guys don't give up with your dishonest attempts to make the dummy look good, do you?
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