Tag Archives: 9/11

International news

End of Cold War brought disarray

Joe Scarborough asks a compelling question about the state of U.S. foreign policy.

How did it get so messed up?

The one-time Republican congressman from Florida wonders how the world’s pre-eminent military and economic power can get in such a muddled mess.

I think I have a partial answer. Or perhaps just some food for thought: The end of the Cold War.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/03/history-scarborough-obama-bush-isil-israel-116495.html?hp=l3_3

Geopolitical relationships have gotten incredibly complex since the days when the Soviet Union sought to control the world and the United States kept pushing back the Big Ol’ Bear.

Our adversary was a clearly defined nuclear power. It covered 8 million or so square miles of territory across two continents. They were fearsome. Then again, so were we.

Then the Berlin Wall came crashing down in 1989. Two years later, the Evil Empire imploded.

Just like that, our Enemy No. 1 was gone.

In its place a lot of other enemies have arisen to rivet our attention. Scarborough thinks two American presidents — George W. Bush and Barack Obama — have presided over this turmoil. Granted, the Soviet Union disappeared on George H.W. Bush’s watch and his successor, Bill Clinton, managed to keep the assortment of new enemies at bay.

Here’s part of what Scarborough writes: “Bush’s ideological foreign policy was tragically followed by Obama’s delusional belief that America could erase the sins of the Bush-Cheney era by simply abdicating the U.S.’s role as indispensable nation.”

I am not certain anyone quite yet is capable of juggling so many balls at the same time. President Bush took dead aim at al-Qaeda immediately after 9/11, but then expanded that effort into a war against Iraq. Then came Barack Obama — and the world has just kept on getting more unstable.

But we still haven’t yet figured out how to manage crises that keep cropping up throughout the Middle East and northern Africa. The result has been, as Scarborough notes, a vast explosion of crises involving ISIL, Syria, Turkey, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria … and even Venezuela in our own hemisphere. Let’s not forget North Korea and the immigration crisis emanating from Latin America.

We’ve got to keep our eyes on many balls all at once.

 

national news

Have we seen enough from Secret Service?

Isn’t the Secret Service supposed to be the elite of the elite? The cream of our national security apparatus? The individuals charged with protecting the Most Powerful Person on the Planet?

What in the name of Homeland Security is going on with these individuals?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/secret-service-agents-disrupted-bomb-investigation-at-white-house/2015/03/12/0eb74590-c8c4-11e4-aa1a-86135599fb0f_story.html

Two more agents have been accused of driving under the influence of alcohol and taking their vehicle through an active investigation scene involving a bomb.

The Secret Service has a new director who was supposed to turn the agency around after it went through a series of shameful incidents involving disgraceful behavior and serious breaches of security at the White House.

Joseph Clancy hasn’t turned anything around.

The Secret Service used to be run by the Treasury Department. Since 9/11, it’s been handed over to the Department of Homeland Security. Did we hear of these kinds of screw-ups when Treasury was in charge? Maybe once in a while, but not with this kind of chilling regularity.

Any thoughts of returning the Secret Service to the Treasury Department? Well? Are there?

 

International news, national news, political news

Foes 'all too willing to test us'

Here’s a tiny part of what former Texas Gov. Rick Perry said before a crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

“Here’s the simple truth of our foreign policy: Our allies doubt us and our adversaries are all too willing to test us. No one should be surprised, no one should be surprised that dictators like Assad would cross the president’s red line because he knows the president will not even defend the line that separates our nation from Mexico.” 

http://www.texasmonthly.com/burka-blog/perry-compares-middle-east-troubles-texas-border

Did you get what he’s inferring here? Perry is possibly going to run for the Republican nomination for president of the United States — again — in 2016. To make the case to GOP voters, he must lambaste the president from the other party.

I understand how it works. Democrats do the same thing to Republican presidents as well, as U.S. Sen. Barack Obama demonstrated when he won the presidency in 2008.

But is this “testing” of U.S. power and prestige limited to just this president?

Let’s see: President Richard Nixon was tested when Arab nations executed an oil embargo in 1973, causing near-panic at gasoline service stations throughout this country. President Ronald Reagan was tested in 1983 when terrorists blew up the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, killing 241 of our young Marines. President George H.W. Bush was tested in Panama when the dictator Manuel Noriega kept looking the other way while drugs were pouring into this country from Panama. President George W. Bush certainly was tested when terrorists flew those hijacked jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11.

Yes, Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were tested too. Carter faced the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979-80  and Clinton had to deal with those warlords in Somalia.

Testing of U.S. presidents has been the norm perhaps since the end of World War II, when this nation emerged from that global conflagration as the world’s pre-eminent military and economic power.

It goes with the territory. It’s part of the president’s job description.

 

International news

'Jihadi John' gets a name

Now we’re getting somewhere in the hunt for the guy seen in all those ISIL videos.

“Jihadi John” has been identified. The individual wearing all black reportedly is Mohammed Emwazi, a Kuwaiti-born Briton who is known to come from a prosperous family; he earned a degree in computer programming. The world has seen this guy, heard his voice and assumed he’s carried out the gruesome beheadings of captives, some of whom were Americans and Brits.

http://news.yahoo.com/bbc-names-jihadi-john-suspect-islamic-state-beheading-110602366.html

British intelligence officials, naturally, aren’t confirming or denying this goon’s name. It came from The Washington Post, which likely has sources within the UK’s intelligence network.

If the guy comes from a well-to-do family, there likely will be pictures revealing his face released before too long.

A part of me believes the Brits and U.S. intelligence officials are looking for this guy as these words are being written. Another part of me understands the difficulty in finding him and, um, dealing with him once he’s located. Yes, we found Osama bin Laden hiding in plain sight in Pakistan, but that search took nearly a decade after 9/11 to complete. Our spooks located bin Laden and the commander in chief ordered the hit that was carried out by SEALs and CIA commandos.

Will Emwazi meet the same fate as bin Laden?

I surely hope so.

 

national news

Rudy wraps himself in 9/11 tragedy

Rudy Guiliani is becoming more shameless by the hour.

After saying that President Barack Obama doesn’t love America, the former New York City mayor has essentially doubled down on that criticism by telling right-wing talk show host Sean Hannity that Obama “didn’t live through 9/11; I did.”

http://mediamatters.org/video/2015/02/19/rudy-giuliani-invokes-911-to-reinforce-his-clai/202583

So, what is the former mayor suggesting? It might be that he’s glorifying his involvement in a crisis that was thrust upon him by those terrorists who flew the planes into the World Trade Center.

No one with any memory of that terrible day would begrudge the mayor for the role he played in rallying his city and, thus, the country in the wake of horrifying tragedy. I certainly get it. His Honor stood tall, along with President Bush.

But why bring that up now as he criticizes President Obama — wrongly, in my view?

He’s suggesting the president doesn’t take international terrorism seriously enough. He posited the ridiculous notion that Obama doesn’t love the country.

Now he says he’s justified in criticizing the president because he was mayor of New York on the morning that the terrorists stunned the world with their brazen attack on the United States of America.

No, Mr. Mayor. You were in the wrong place at the right time. That’s all. Yes, you responded heroically — but your actions — by themselves — don’t give you the right to question the president’s love of country.

 

national news, political news

Guiliani makes zero sense

So help me, I never thought Rudy Guiliani was capable of going around the bend.

That is, until I read about his remarks delivered last night at a dinner honoring Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

The former New York mayor, the hero of the 9/11 response and Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2001 actually said that President Barack Obama doesn’t love America.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/giuliani-obama-doesnt-love-america/ar-BBhKLyD

What on God’s Earth has the mayor been drinking, smoking, eating or taking intravenously?

Has the man not heard the president speak of his love of a country where only his “story can happen”? How the mixed-race son of an immigrant and a young woman from Kansas could graduate from college, earn a law degree, become elected to a state legislature, to the U.S. Senate and then become elected — twice — to the presidency of the United States? How about how that son could be raised by a single mother after his father abandoned his family and how he spent time growing up overseas and then grew up listening to his maternal grandparents tell of their struggles while living in Middle America?

The president proclaims his love of country damn near every time I hear him speak in public. Doesn’t he wish God’s blessings on the United States of America at the end of every speech he ever gives?

Isn’t the former mayor paying attention?

And yet Guiliani said last night that he believes the president is a patriot. What? Which is it, Mr. Mayor? Is he a patriot or does he detest the country of his birth?

 

 

national news

Ted Cruz: Exaggerator in chief

Ted Cruz’s mother must have told him when he was a boy: “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times, don’t exaggerate.”

Or perhaps words to that effect.

Well, the Texas Republican freshman U.S. senator, is exaggerating in the extreme — once again — while criticizing the Obama administration’s approach to fighting the war on terror.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/ted-cruz-obama-radical-islamic-terrorists-115312.html?hp=l2_4

He can’t stop blasting President Obama for declining to use the words “Islamic terrorism.” He also ripped Obama a new one for the White House’s failure to acknowledge that the 21 Egyptians who were beheaded by Islamic State terrorists were Christians.

Oh, and then he was critical — naturally — for State Department flack Marie Harf’s statement that we need to work toward ending poverty in the nations that breed the terrorists. Cruz said this: “Now, with respect, that is idiocy. The solution here is not expanded Medicaid. The solution is the full force of U.S. military power to destroy the leaders of ISIS. They have declared war … jihad on the United States. Jihad is another word the president doesn’t say.”

I understand what the young man is seeking to do here. He’s trying to make a point by embellishing what Harf said, or meant. Medicaid? Come on.

As for the president being an “apologist for radical Islamic terrorists,” Sen. Cruz needs — once again — to examine the record. We’re killing these individuals every single day. We’re doing precisely what we’ve been doing since President George W. Bush sent us to war right after 9/11.

No, I don’t expect this kind of rhetoric to stop. After all, we’ve got a presidential campaign to wage and I expect fully to hear a lot more of it from other potential candidates for the White House. I’m just spewing my own frustration at what I keep hearing.

Bear with me, please. I’ll get over it — eventually.

 

International news, military news, political news

Let's stick to the singular 'war'

1 Comment

A Huffington Post headline contains a word that requires a correction.

It says, “Jeb Bush won’t talk about wars his brother started.”

The operative word here is “wars.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/14/jeb-bush-iraq-afghanistan_n_6683970.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000013

The Huffington Post is no friend of Jeb Bush or of his brother, former President George W. Bush. Having stipulated the obvious, I now shall make a crucial point.

The “wars” referenced in the article are the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. I hereby submit that George W. Bush didn’t start the Afghan War. The first shot — if you want to call it that — was fired on 9/11 when two jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center, another one plowed into the Pentagon and a fourth plane crashed into a Pennsylvania field as passengers fought to retake the aircraft that had been hijacked by al-Qaeda terrorists.

Nearly 3,000 innocent victims died on that terrible day.

President Bush responded to an act of war against the United States. The war began because terrorists headquartered in the Afghan wilderness plotted the dastardly deed and were plotting to do even more damage to this country and to others around the world.

Our military response was in retaliation for what the monstrous murderers did on 9/11.

As for the Iraq War, yes, Bush started that war. The Bush administration relied on bad intelligence — or perhaps fabricated a weapons of mass destruction scenario to justify a military invasion of a sovereign country. Whatever the cause, the Iraq War was ill-conceived and then sold to the public dishonestly as a relatively simple mission.

The world would then learn that Iraq didn’t possess WMD, which only worsened the public perception that President Bush was out to settle a score with the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

That is the war the former president’s brother, Jeb — who’s considering a presidential campaign in 2016 — should keep hidden in the closet for as long as he can.

The Afghan War? That one was justified.

It’s an open question about whether the effort in Afghanistan was worth it. The U.S. combat mission there is over and the Afghans will be left to defend their country against the Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists who are seeking to retake the country.

Jeb Bush, though, will have his hands full trying to justify the Iraq War and whether the cost of that bloody conflict — more than 4,400 American lives — was worth the fight.

national news

Major attack possible in U.S.? Do ya think?

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein says now is the time for “vigilance” after the massacre at the offices of a Paris satirical magazine.

Well, what do you know? The former head of the Senate Intelligence Committee is demonstrating an impressive command of the obvious.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/229145-dem-senator-major-attack-in-the-realm-of-possibility

Feinstein, a California Democrat, is trying to alert Americans to the possibility of a “major” terrorist attack on U.S. soil. I would argue that we’ve been on high alert ever since 9/11. And we should be on alert, possibly for as long as terrorists exist in the world.

The shootout at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris has stunned the world. Twelve people died in the melee. Three of the assassins were killed by French commandos; a fourth remains on the lam.

The Paris mayhem has brought to the fore once again that terrorists will do whatever it takes to strike fear in the world. We’ve known this all along, even before 9/11.

But we let our guard down and on that Tuesday morning 13 years ago we paid a terrible price.

I appreciate Sen. Feinstein’s word of extreme caution.

However, I hope she’s preaching to the proverbial choir.  We damn sure ought to be on high alert already.

International news

War on terror is not 'over'

1 Comment

Politicians hate taking back things they say. They aren’t disposed — given the nature of the work they do — to admit when they’re wrong, at least not openly.

President Obama has declared in recent years that “The war on terror is over.”

I cannot read his mind, but my throbbing bunion and my trick knee are telling me the same thing: He well might wish he could take it back.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/01/09/Krauthammer/

He pronounced the end of the war on terror as the United States was pulling its troops out of Iraq. Our ground war there had concluded. All that was left was to fight the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other splinter terror groups in Afghanistan.

The terrorists have taken a terrible beating at the hands of the greatest military apparatus in world history. They keep coming back. Their resilience is astonishing.

Al-Qaeda is now taking credit for the Paris shooting at the offices of Charlie Hebdo. France is on high alert. French intelligence operatives are looking for a fourth terrorist who reportedly might have fled to Syria; three other terrorists were killed.

The columnist Charles Krauthammer, a psychiatrist by training who isn’t known as a counterterrorism “expert,” says we’re entering the “third stage of the jihad.” His link is attached to this blog post. I don’t quite understand how he knows what stage this we’re, or how the terrorists measure these things. He’s a smart fellow, though, so perhaps he knows something many of the rest of us don’t know.

I do know, this, though: The president spoke far too prematurely in declaring the “war on terror is over.”

Indeed, some of us have noted since the dark days immediately after 9/11 that the war against international terror may never end. I questioned at the time of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan how we could declare victory, other than by simply declaring it and going home. The late U.S. Sen. George Aiken, R-Vt., once proposed such a thing — only partly in jest — when he suggested we declare victory in Vietnam and then just leave.

That well might be what President Obama has done. He declared a victory that he couldn’t define.

The Paris attack and all the attacks that have come in the years since 9/11 persuade me, at least, that the war on terror will be ongoing well past the foreseeable future.

I am not expecting an admission of error from the president of the United States. I believe, though, that we ought to stop talking like victors while continuing to act like combatants.

This war isn’t over.