Ah-HAH!

Well now I know why we were unable to advance the fight against bin Laden for at least nine years:

Scheuer, who headed the CIA’s bin Laden unit for nine years, sees a different way out — through U.S. foreign policy. He said he resigned last November to expose the U.S. leadership’s “willful blindness” to what needs to be done: withdraw the U.S. military from the Mideast, end “unqualified support” for Israel, sever close ties to Arab oil-state “tyrannies.”

Got it. Write down Al Qaeda's demands. Grant all of them. Wait for them to politely withdraw from the world stage. This guy is a freakin' genius. Someone explain to me how the guy who FUCKED UP the bin Laden hunt for NINE YEARS has become an 'expert' on the subject. And then we get the completely contradictory solution from another doomsayer:

What should be broken, he said, is the cycle of terrorist recruitment through the generations. “Here you come to the main challenge.”

He and most of the other half-dozen experts said the world’s richer powers must address “underlying causes” — lessen the appeal of radicalism by improving economies, political rights and education in Arab and Muslim countries.

So...we need to completely withdraw...and then provide the sort of influence that can only be provided by a constant presence in the region. That certainly makes sense. Now if we can just get black re-labelled as white we'll be on the right track.

UPDATE:

And yet some MORE nonsense from the 'experts:'

Perhaps. Yet for a small fraction of what our involvement in Iraq has cost us in blood and treasure, we could have shored up our homeland defenses and made it well-nigh impossible for the terrorists to attack America again.

The rerouting of an even tinier fraction of these vast resources in support of a proactive campaign by small teams of special forces hunter networks would keep the terrorists perpetually on the run, unable even to think about coming back here or about striking elsewhere.

Really? How exactly would we have secured our homeland defenses? How much money would we be willing to spend? How much aggressive policing and inconvenience will any nation of free citizens take? The idea that homeland security is as easy as pouring more federal money onto the problem is nonsense in its purest form - nonsense that will be highlighted when future attacks strike areas we had never thought to strengthen - regardless of the funds available. So if we can just run a huge wall around the country, deputize every third citizen, and eavesdrop on every conversation...everywhere we can protect ourselves - what a BARGAIN!

And then we have the tiny teams of special forces running around the world...facing prosecution in Italy, getting overrun in Afghanistan, receiving too much political pressure to operate effectively in Yemen, meeting resistance from US ambassadors who refuse to allow operations within 'their' country.

Ideas that look good in sound bites don't do so well in the real world...but, of course, they can always be spun as sounding better than reality - because real solutions are messy, never work quite as we had hoped, and can always be second-guessed by so-called experts who can offer pie-in-the-sky solutions that will never see the light of day or face the test of surviving contact with reality. Thanks for the advice, perfessor. I recommend you don't venture out of your classroom too much - there's a real world out there.

Tags:


Terrorism
Doomsaying
Journalism
Analyst vs. Policymaker