| To: Win Smith who wrote (148770) | 10/23/2004 11:15:38 AM | | From: Michael Watkins | | | | The lack of public understanding of what is real vs what is spin doesn't surprise me. And its not just spinmeister Rove that is to blame for this. Public ignorance is epidemic.
Clearly the public at large doesn't get more real news than the 5 minutes of sound-bites delivered between the local news show opening graphics and the cute weathergirl.
Somewhere in that 5 minutes, 3 minutes are taken up with stories of the latest local robbery, gun deaths, fatal traffic accident, and a "human interest" story on a dog/pig/bird/child/old house/guy who can tow a semi-trailer with nothing but a rope and his teeth.
30 seconds are devoted to the exit for "breaking for important messages" and saying hello to the sportscaster and flirting with the cute weather girl before launching into the final 90 seconds on important national and international news.
Most of that time is wasted on pictures of both candidates and their latest rally; absolutely none of it is devoted to critical analysis or expose of what is really happening in the world.
Fade to black... |
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| To: Michael Watkins who wrote (148757) | 10/23/2004 12:02:52 PM | | From: Neocon | | | | The Soviet Union was nowhere near economic collapse, despite consumer dissatisfaction. Consider this: even Gorbachev did not feel compelled to follow the Chinese model, which had a proven track record in creating economic growth.
Gorbachev did not rise due to internal politics, but because of the success of Reagan in rallying the West against Breshnev's adventurism. The Kremlim was desperate to mount a peace offensive to lead to another round of "detente".
Computers and telecommunicatons did not hit critical mass until the next decade, and even then have not led to the toppling of the Chinese Communist regime. It is not very relevant.
We engaged in a classic tit for tat strategy: countering the Soviets if they were aggressive, rewarding them if they were conciliatory. In addition, they knew we could outspend them on Star Wars, and they were already spending a much greater proportion of their GDP on the military than we were, so they were anxious to undermine our interest in SDI. This helped to keep Gorbachev in power after the Kremlin became disillusioned with reform, and by the time they were willing to act against him, the political situation had evolved too much, and Yeltsin was able to resist the Kremlin.
You are not even a good historian, much less a good conservative. |
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| To: GST who wrote (148762) | 10/23/2004 12:15:44 PM | | From: Neocon | | | | | Should there be a draft for policemen? How about firemen? Is someone who has never been a policeman disqualified from being mayor? Is there the least bit of logic to what you are saying? |
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| To: stockman_scott who wrote (148769) | 10/23/2004 12:19:27 PM | | From: Neocon | | | | | Yes, this is the Buchananite wing of the conservative movement, the one that questions whether we should have entered World War II. But carry on........ |
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| To: Michael Watkins who wrote (148752) | 10/23/2004 12:40:12 PM | | From: jlallen | | | | | There's nothing wrong with being rich.....its how it affects your actions and the way you deal with people which is the difference between LB and THK. |
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| To: Neocon who wrote (148776) | 10/23/2004 12:48:24 PM | | From: jlallen | | | | Its complete silliness of course...but consider the source....In our society our military service is now AVF. When you sign up you take your chances..... Also, I saw no such grousing from pinheads like GST when Clinton, who affirmatively evaded service, lied to his draft board and protested overseas sent our men into harm's way in numerous places around the globe.....
The pinhead hypocrisy and dishonesty is breathtaking..... |
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| To: KyrosL who wrote (148722) | 10/23/2004 12:49:48 PM | | From: stockman_scott | | | | Tora Bora: What Really Happened?
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By Peter Bergen [the award winning journalist*]
_________________
The Battle of Tora Bora: What Really Happened?
The question of whether the United Sates missed an opportunity to capture or kill Osama bin Laden during the battle of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan in December 2001 has become an issue in the razor-close campaign. During the October 8th presidential debate, Sen. John Kerry said of capturing bin Laden, "The right time was Tora Bora, when we had him cornered in the mountains." Writing in the New York Times this week, General Tommy Franks, a Bush supporter, and the overall commander of the Tora Bora operation, said that this charge "doesn't square with reality". Franks also stated, "We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora," and that the US did not "outsource" the battle to Afghan warlords of questionable competence and loyalty, as Sen. Kerry has repeatedly charged. At a town hall meeting in Ohio on Tuesday, vice president Cheney said Kerry's criticisms of the Tora Bora campaign are "absolute garbage."
So: Was al Qeada's leader at Tora Bora? According to a widely-reported background briefing by Pentagon officials in mid-December 2001 there was "reasonable certainty" that bin Laden was indeed at Tora Bora, a judgment based on intercepted radio transmissions. Moreover, Luftullah Mashal, a senior official in Afghanistan's Interior Ministry, told me that based on conversations he had with a Saudi al Qaeda financier and bin Laden's chef, both of whom were at the battle, bin Laden was at Tora Bora. And Palestinian journalist, Abdel Bari Atwan, a consistently accurate source of information about al Qaeda, has reported that bin Laden was wounded in the shoulder at Tora Bora. Indeed, in an audiotape released on al Jazeera television last year bin Laden himself recounted his own memories of the battle. "We were about three hundred holy warriors. We dug one hundred trenches over an area of one square mile, so as to avoid the huge human losses from the bombardment." In short, there is plenty of evidence that bin Laden was at Tora Bora, and no evidence indicating that he was anywhere else at the time.
That being the case: Did the U.S. military screw up a golden opportunity to capture bin Laden, during the one moment in the past three years that his location was known? There is no debating the fact that US "outsourced" the Tora Bora operation to local Afghan warlords. According to Commander Muhammad Musa, who commanded six hundred Afghan soldiers on the Tora Bora frontline, while the American bombing campaign was very effective, US forces on the ground were small in number and ineffective: "There were six American soldiers with us. My personal view is if they had blocked the way out to Pakistan, al Qaeda would not have had a way to escape." And that's the key problem. There were only a relatively few American 'boots on the ground' at Tora Bora, enabling bin Laden and hundreds of other members of al Qaeda to melt away and fight another day.
Why did the United States military--the most powerful armed force in history-- not seal off the Tora Bora region, instead relying only on a handful of US Special Forces on the ground? Historians will no doubt be debating that question for many years, but part of the answer is that the US military was a victim of its own success. Scores of US Special Forces soldiers calling in air-strikes, in combination with thousands of Afghans on the ground, overthrew the Taliban in a few weeks of fighting; a textbook case of unconventional warfare. However, this approach was a failure at Tora Bora where large numbers of Americans on the ground were needed to throw up an effective cordon around al Qaeda's leaders.
Apologists for the US military failure at Tora Bora will no doubt provide several compelling reasons why this was the case, including a lack of airlift capabilities from the US base in neighboring Uzbekistan. However, such explanations are hard to square with the fact that hundreds of journalists managed to find their way to Tora Bora, a battle covered on live television by the world's leading news organizations. If Fox, CNN and NBC could arrange for their crews to cover Tora Bora it is puzzling that the US military could not put more boots on the ground to find the man who was the intellectual author of the 9/11 attacks. And in that sense, Sen. Kerry's charge that Tora Bora was a missed opportunity to bring bin Laden to justice isn't "garbage", but an accurate reflection of the historical record.
peterbergen.com
*Peter Bergen is a print and television journalist and author of Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden. He is CNN's terrorism analyst and has written for a variety of publications including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Vanity Fair, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post, The Washington Times and the Washington Monthly. In the U.K. he has written for The Times, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph. He is presently a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington D.C. and is an Adjunct Professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. |
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