War on terror is working

[unhappycamper]

Barf alert. :puke:


War on terror is working
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | September 9, 2007


IF THERE WAS one thing we all knew after Sept. 11, 2001, it was that another massacre was coming. The next terrorist attack on US soil, it was asserted time and again, was not a matter of if, but of when.

Americans weren't the only ones who expected Al Qaeda to commit another slaughter. Al Qaeda did, too. Earlier this year, terrorist mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confessed that in addition to 9/11, he had been planning to attack the Sears Tower in Chicago, the New York Stock Exchange, and the Empire State Building, and to blow up US embassies and nuclear power plants.

None of those attacks occurred. In the six years since 9/11, Islamist terrorism has led to scenes of horrific carnage in, among other places, Madrid, London, Bali, Istanbul, Israel, and Russia. Yet there has been no catastrophic attack on the American homeland - something no one would have predicted in 2001. What explains such good fortune?

~snip~

The jihad against us didn't begin on 9/11. It had started long before, with the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran in 1979. Years of Islamist bombings, hijackings, and hostage-takings followed, but few Americans recognized that war was being waged against us by a determined enemy that cried "Death to America!" and meant it. In a New York Times column two months before 9/11, the former deputy director of the State Department's counterterrorism office pooh-poohed as "fantasies" the belief that "the United States is the most popular target of terrorists" and that "extremist Islamic groups cause most terrorism."

The attacks of 9/11 ripped away such comfortable misjudgments. President Bush declared that we were at war with terrorism, and likened it to the global wars against Nazism and Communism. The US government overhauled its counterterrorism operations, moving aggressively to disrupt and damage Al Qaeda's maneuvers abroad and to uproot would-be jihadists at home. After years in which terrorism was regarded as a legal crime to be prosecuted after the fact, the Bush administration made preemption the overriding goal. Instead of waiting for terrorists to strike, the government - armed with expanded powers to seize records, monitor communications, and search homes and businesses - would strike first.

~snip~

What is in the enemy's mind we cannot know for sure. What we do know - what 9/11 made brutally clear - is that we are at war. The enemy is in this till the finish. We had better be, too.


Rest of seriously flawed article at: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/09/09/war_on_terror_is_working/


End barf alert.

[CJCRANE]

1. The Iranians are shi'ites

and not connected to "al-Qaeda" or Bush's fundamentalist Wahabbi allies (both sunni), so it's a totally false thesis.

[Double T]

2. Same tired, old bushco terror justification theme.

Can't wait for NEW leadership that UNDERSTANDS that the current course of 'action' is absolutely not working and there is a better way to deal with the terror problem. The feeling of nausea has passed, for the moment.

[spindoctor]

3. Horrific carnage in other places is OUR good fortune????

That "carnage" would not have occurred without US "strategy" (I use that term very losely) fertilizing the terrorist breeding grounds.

This guy has the nerve to gloat over the fact that other countries are paying the price for our policies? I declare a jihad on his sorry ass.

[Henny Penny]

4. The war on terror is working!

People are no longer terrified because they regard the whole concept as complete and utter bull shit.

Mission accomplished, I say.

[Perry Logan]

5. World terrorism has tripled under Bush's watch.

[Amonester]

6. So that's the moron's strategy? Fight terra with a bigger terra...

President chainey and his pretzeldent * R bigger terrarists who's planet destructive ideologies threaten the survival of life on this fragile planet 24/7, so why shouldn't they be fought too?