Bush: 'Tempting' and wrong to think terrorism behind us

(Mr. Silva, I apologize in advance as this isn't completely on-topic.)

It seems to me the mainstream media are doing little to prevent their slide into irrelevence largely because the American people simply no longer trust they'll "get it right".

Reporters keep falling for shell games Zippy the Pinhead could pick up on and editors parrot all the same talking points and sound bites you'd likely find in Tony Snow's playbook.

The Swamp and the arts and sports sections, in my humble opinion, are about the only things worth salvaging when the Trib changes hands.

Mr. Zell, if you're out there reading, please, for the love of God, make your first order of business relieving neocon apologist Bruce Dold of his editorial page duties and find someone committing to digging up the truth, however unpleasant or painful it may be, and informing the citizenry of the facts.

That Dold still has yet to call for the resignation of The Decider Guy is, frankly, an embarrassment to any Illinoisan with the slightest enthusiasm for reason and justice.

Also, I hope the Tribune will consider running this cartoon:

http://www.workingforchange.com/comic.cfm?itemid=22437

Mr. Silva, thank you for the forum. GO CUBS!!!

Nearly six years have passed and Dubya hasn't caught (or better yet killed) bin-Laden.

That fact is a propaganda bonanza for the morons who want to get their 72 virgins ticket punched.

Bush - "Tempting And Wrong To Think Terrorism Behind Us"

Yeah, and that would be because you and Cheney decided to invade Iraq and create a whole new generation of potential terrorists.

Whatever happened to Osama Bin Forgotten, Mr.Commander Guy?

To paraphrase a great quote from the 70's:

"Karl, you ignorant slut."

The editorial page is the only thing that is worth reading in the Trib. The other pages take 5 - 10 minutes - tops.

The Sun-Times has already indicated that they will go back to be a left-leaning newspapaer, the last thing this city needs is two versions of Pravda.

If we kill or capture bin Laden, does anybody really believe that terrorism will end?

If we hadn't invaded Iraq, does anybody really believe we wouldn't be in danger today?

If you answered "yes" to either of those questions, please go and register a complaint with God, because She obviously neglected to give you a brain.

The fact remains that 911, The USS Cole incident and many, MANY other acts of Islamist terrorism PREDATE Dubya and the Iraq war.

The bad guys have been trying to hurt us for at least 30 years!

Yes Bush screwed up -- and BIG TIME -- and yes he made Iraq a focal point for the Islamists, for which i curse him daily...

but it's just plain stupid to suggest (as some here do, repeatedly) that everything was just fine before Bush and everything will be just fine when we finally get rid of him.

Ummmmm,
It's very well documented that B.J.Clinton had 8-12 chances to take-out Osama Binladen during his presidency,but he failed to pull the trigger and leave Osama's d.n.a. all over the desert,instead he left his own d.n.a. on the dress of a young girl.
B.J. was,and still is a liberals dream...more interested in self-gratification than taking out the guy that planned 9/11 for (THREE YEARS) right under his nose.

Paulo

What a load of bullfeathers, especially by Karl B. Is the media not liberal enough for you, Karl B Marx Jr.? The NY Lying Times is one of the most one-sided newspapers in the country! At least you do recognize that most of the Swamp items are Far Left (since it pleases you so much) and that most of the contribuitors are Loony Bird leftists who get their talking points from the DailyKos and moveon.org.

Not surprising that Karl B. would be a Cubs fan too, another loser of an outfit he supports. Whether it's losing in Iraq or anywhere else because Karl B hates America or backing the losingest baseball franchise in history or being a proud member of the Loony Left, Karl B is a loser.

Here we go again with the usual bunch of Republican apologists, (Insert Clever Foot In Mouth, Paula and Johnny Dipnoodle) who seem to always fall back on the old "it's Bill Clinton's fault" to cover up for their Republican Cheerleader in Chief, who has been wetting the bed on every issue he has touched for the last 6+ years.

It's very well documented that B.J.Clinton had 8-12 chances to take-out Osama Binladen during his presidency

Posted by: Paulo | July 21, 2007 05:53 PM

I dare you to document it, you blithering idiot.

John D.,

"Yes" or "no". Are you a neocon sympathizer?

One more thing, John D., I'm an Illinois Lincoln Republican. There are probably only about seven or eight of us left in existence.

I live a hundred yards from the finest sculpture ever crafted commemorating Honest Abe and I'm twenty minutes away from Allerton Park, one of the seven wonders of Illinois, donated to us by a descendent of one of the original Mayflower pilgrims.

And you, sir, are a disgrace to the proud state of Illinois.

We drove the Klan out and we'll do the same with neocon lunacy.

Peace out, amigo.

Not surprising that Karl B. would be a Cubs fan too, another loser of an outfit he supports. Whether it's losing in Iraq or anywhere else because Karl B hates America or backing the losingest baseball franchise in history or being a proud member of the Loony Left, Karl B is a loser.

Posted by: John D | July 21, 2007 6:08 PM

John D, you and your girlfriend Paula just get kookier by the day. Have ya happened to see where the Cubs are in the standings??? Two and a half out. White Sox 15!!! Mind you I like the Sox too, but then again I'm not an angry, ranting idiot either. You on the other hand bring new meaning to the word insane!

Illogic Man, if you want to see true insanity, I suggest reading just about every post from your buds on the Loony Left. And, yeah, the Flubs are playing great ball and the Sox stink, but 99 years and no World Series!
Karl B Marx Jr., you, a Lincoln Republican? Take some more LSD, OK?
Me, a "neocon"? Hardly. More clueless folks who don't know what neocon means and throw it around because they are told to. But I'd rather be a neocon sympathizer than a member of the Loony Left Brigade.

The American general in Nineva
province has stated that he believes the Iraqis are about ready to take over in that area allowing the American troops to get the heck out.

That is not good news for the Bush administration, which clearly wants to turn the 180,000 US force in its entirety over to Hillary in
January 2009. An "in your face" departure from the presidency. And don't be too sure she'll be able to get us out. She's been pretty evasive on the subject.

Meanwhile, in another part of Iraq, one general says it will take another two years to pacify Iraq. Another two years. That means, at $10 billion a month, close to another quarter trillion dollars, brining our total expenditures by that time to $750 billions.

Imagine. $750 billion, going for a trillion. Americans sure love throwing their money at those Iraqis. Maybe it would have been cheaper
to just make them the 51st state. That would stop the sectarian violence for sure (everybody, but everybody wants to live in America).

Neocon sympathizer it is then John D. Either way your a sheep following an inept policy.

Americans are dying for an ill-conceived war. Iraq is a cluster %uck, and one with a puppet government. I have no idea why you're defending the morons in the White House. Your supporting a bankrupt administration in a failed enterprise. p.s. Several organizational failures: 1) Rumsfeld absolutely refused to plan for the post-invasion necessities in Iraq. 2) No one (including the President) asked the vital questions: How does the invasion improve our position in the region, and where do we want to end up vis a vis Iran? Although Saddam was an evil tyrant, he was an important counterweight to Iran. 3) Many senior generals "rolled over" when Rumsfeld bullied them, and gave up their important roles as the senior military advisors to the civilian government. 4) The coincidence of Cheney and Rumsfeld micromanaging the war clouded the advice given to the President. In many respects, the current war is a modern Republican version of "The Best and the Brightest". 5) The military meritocracy does not reward creativity (although GEN Patreaus seems to be an exception to the rule).

p.s. Your guy Bush resigned the U.S.A. humiliation the day he entered Iraq. I know he has read A SAVAGE WAR OF PEACE Algeria 1954-1962
By Alistair Horne
New York Review Books. 608 pp. Paperback, $19.95

Maybe he should have read it BEFORE GOING IN!!!

The Washington Post November 19, 2006 Sunday Aftershocks; A classic on France’s losing fight against Arab rebels contains troubling echoes of Iraq today.

Reviewed by Thomas E. Ricks

When Americans talk about the raging insurgency in Iraq, they often draw parallels with the Vietnam War, but a better analogy is probably the French war against nationalist rebels in Algeria from 1954 to 1962. That’s one reason why the landmark history of that conflict, Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace, has been an underground bestseller among U.S. military officers over the last three years, with used copies selling on Amazon.com for $150. Indeed, “Algeria” has become almost a codeword among U.S. counterinsurgency specialists — a shorthand for the depth and complexity of the mess we face in Iraq. Earlier this year, I referred to Horne’s book while conversing with one such expert in Taji, Iraq, and got a grim nod of agreement.

Now a new paperback edition of Horne’s 1977 classic has been issued, cutting the price of wisdom to a more reasonable $19.95. In a new preface, Horne makes the connection to Iraq explicit. First, he notes, the Algerian insurgents fighting to end France’s colonial control over the country avoided taking on the French army directly; instead, they attacked the police and other more vulnerable targets, thereby demoralizing local supporters of the French presence. Second, Algeria’s porous borders greatly aided the insurgents, who could receive reinforcements, arms and sanctuary from neighboring countries such as Tunisia and Morocco. Third, and most emphatically, he writes that “torture should never, never, never be resorted to by any Western society.”

Those three parallels are provocative enough, as far as they go. But many other, perhaps less obvious points in Horne’s lucid, well-organized history may do even more to deepen our understanding of the Iraq War.

Again and again, Horne wrote passages about the French in Algeria that could describe the U.S. military in Iraq. As I wrote about the U.S. Army’s big “cordon-and-sweep” operations that detained tens of thousands of civilian Iraqi males in the Sunni Triangle in the fall of 2003, I remembered Horne: “This is the way an administration caught with its pants down reacts under such circumstances. . . . First comes the mass indiscriminate round-up of suspects, most of them innocent but converted into ardent militants by the fact of their imprisonment.”

Like the Americans in Iraq, the French in Algeria consistently misunderstood the nature of the opposition, focusing too much on supposed foreign support and too little on the local roots of the insurgency. Horne also detected a distinctly familiar pattern of official optimism among French officials, who were quick to declare their war “virtually over” four years before it ended in their defeat.

Moreover, A Savage War of Peace draws an important distinction between torture by the police and torture by the military. The former damages mainly individuals and need not be hugely damaging to the war effort; the latter, Horne quotes a former French officer as saying, involves the honor of the nation — as it did at Abu Ghraib and other facilities where Iraqis were abused by American soldiers in 2003-04.

Along the way, Horne offers three other comments that are not particularly encouraging. First, when considering the Bush administration’s policy of having U.S. forces stand down as newly trained Iraqi forces stand up, it is worth noting that throughout the eight years of the Algerian war, more Algerians were fighting on the French side than on the rebel side — and the French still lost.

Second, when trying to understand Iraq’s current violence, it is good to recall Horne’s comment that “such a simultaneous internal ‘civil war’ ” often rages alongside a “revolutionary struggle against an external enemy.”

Finally, when we hear U.S. military officers arguing that they achieved their mission in Iraq but that the rest of the U.S. government failed or the will of the American people faltered, remember Horne’s quotation from a French general, Jacques de Bollardière, who was critical of his army’s performance: “Instead of coldly analysing with courageous lucidity its tactical and strategic errors, it gave itself up to a too human inclination and tried — not without reason, however — to excuse its mistakes by the faults of civil authority and public opinion.”

To be sure, there are huge differences between the two wars. Most notably, the United States isn’t a colonial power in Iraq, seeking to maintain a presence of troops and settlers as long as possible. Rather, in Iraq, victory would consist of getting U.S. personnel out while leaving behind a relatively friendly, open, stable and independent government. And while elements of the French military tried to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle for pulling out from what he termed “a bottomless quagmire,” there is little fear that U.S. officers will go down that rebellious road.

But there are numerous suggestive parallels — mainly relating to conventional Western militaries fighting primarily urban insurgencies in Arab cultures while support for their wars dwindles back home and while the insurgents hope to outlast their better-armed opponents. As such, anyone interested in Iraq should read this book immediately.

Thomas E. Ricks, a Washington Post military correspondent who has reported frequently from Iraq, is the author of “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq.”

UPDATE:

The New York Times, January 17, 2007 Wednesday
Aux Barricades!
By Maureen Dowd

Being president can be really, really hard.

”Sometimes you’re the commander in chief,” W. explained to Scott Pelley on ”60 Minutes.” ”Sometimes you’re the educator in chief, and a lot of times you’re both when it comes to war.”

President Bush has been dutifully making the rounds of TV news shows, trying to make the case that victory in Iraq is ”doable.” He thinks the public will support the Surge if he can simply illuminate a few things that we may have been too thick to understand. For instance, he says he needs to ”explain to people that what happens in the Middle East will affect the future of this country.” Yes, Mr. President, we get it.

He also told Jim Lehrer last night that in 20 years, radical Shiites could be warring with radical Sunnis and Middle Eastern oil could fall into the hands of radicals, who might also get weapons of mass destruction.

So after scaring Americans into backing the Sack of Iraq by warning that radicals could get W.M.D., now he’s trying to scare Americans into supporting the Surge in Iraq by warning that radicals could get W.M.D.

So many deaths, so little progress.

It’s unnerving to be tutored by an educator in chief who is himself being tutored. The president elucidating the Iraqi insurgency for us is learning about the Algerian insurgency from the man who failed to quell the Vietcong insurgency.

During his ”60 Minutes” interview, Mr. Bush mentioned that he was reading Alistair Horne’s classic history, ”A Savage War of Peace,” about why the French suffered a colonial disaster in a guerrilla war against Muslims in Algiers from 1954 to 1962.

The book was recommended to W. by Henry Kissinger, who is working on an official biography of himself with Mr. Horne.

Mr. Horne recalled that Dr. Kissinger told him: ”The president’s one of my best students. He reads all the books I send him.” The author asked the president’s foreign affairs adviser if W. ever wrote any essays on the books. ”Henry just laughed,” Mr. Horne said.

It seems far too late for Mr. Bush to begin studying about counterinsurgency now that Iraq has cratered into civil war. Can’t someone get the president a copy of ”Gone With the Wind”?

Maybe it was inevitable, once W. started reading Camus’s ”L’Etranger,” set in Algeria, that he would move on to Mr. Horne. As The Washington Post military correspondent Tom Ricks wrote in November, the Horne book has been an underground best-seller among U.S. military officers for three years, and ”Algeria” has become almost a code word among counterinsurgency specialists for the mess in Iraq. The Pentagon screened the 1966 movie ”The Battle of Algiers” in 2003, but the commander in chief must have missed it.

I asked Mr. Horne, who was at his home in a small village outside Oxford, England, what the president could learn from his book.

”The depressing problem of getting entangled in the Muslim world,” he replied. ”Algeria was a thoroughly bloodthirsty war that ended horribly and cost the lives of about 20,000 Frenchmen and a million Algerians. There was a terrible civil war. De Gaulle ended up giving literally everything away and left without his pants.”

President de Gaulle had all the same misconceptions as W., that his prestige could persuade the Muslims to accept his terms; that the guerrillas would recognize military defeat and accept sensible compromise; and that, as Mr. Horne writes, ”time would wait while he found the correct formula and then imposed peace with it.”

Mr. Horne also sees sad parallels in the torture issue: ”The French had experience under the Nazis in the occupation and practiced methods the Germans used in Algeria and extracted information that helped them win the Battle of Algiers. But in the long run it lost the war, because it caused such revulsion in France when the news came out, and there was huge opposition to the war from Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.”

In May 2005, Mr. Horne gave a copy of his book to Rummy, with passages about torture underlined. ”I got a savage letter back from him,” the author said.

The best thing now, he said, is to try to ”get around the mullahs” and ”get non-Christian forces in there as quickly as possible, mercenaries. As Henry said the other day, if only we had two brigades of Gurkhas to send to Baghdad.”

Meanwhile, maybe W. should move on to reading Sartre. ”No Exit,” perhaps.

neo-con-ser-va-tive
adj.
designating or of an intellectual, political movement that evolved in the late 1970s in reaction to liberal and leftist thought, advocating INDIVIDUALISM (senses 3 & 4), traditional moral standards, anti-Communist foreign policy, etc.
n.
a neoconservative person

In my world that means a close minded idiot!!! INDIVIDUALISM John D. Something you know nothing about.

Illogic Man, I don't understand "individualism"? Yeah, not me. Not someone who put himself through college, worked 25-50 hours a week in addition to school to pay for it. No loans, no help, all on my own. Still paying off your college loan debt, Illogic Man? No loans? You never got past day care? Not surprised!

Yeah, not me. Not someone who put himself through college, worked 25-50 hours a week in addition to school to pay for it. No loans, no help, all on my own. Still paying off your college loan debt, Illogic Man?
Posted by: John D | July 22, 2007 7:12 PM
Every so often, I don't know whether to feel sorry for you or what. Explain this mini-rant for me. You alone in the history of college students, worked your way through school. Well, kudos. But if you had taken out student loans and paid them back, you would have been part of the nanny state? Anyway, cogratulations on your accomplishment, however belatedly.

Logic:
Thank you for the book suggestion. I was not aware of this prior to reading your post. I will definitely check it out!

This Mr. Bush talks tough about terror and terrorists. His entire presidency is based on terror and fear and the homeland. Someone needs to ask him where bin Laden is these days. I wonder if he knows.
Most of the civilized world and many, many, many people in the U.S. consider Bush a criminal and a terrorist.

Catherine, I'll try this again because for some reason the Swamp censors censored this.
Illogic Man questioned by individualism, which is strange since the Left generally does not believe in individualism. I was merely pointing out that I put myself through college with very little help (parents did give a few dollars here and there, but 90 percent was all me).
I am not slamming those who need student loans nor grants, etc. In fact, it is unfortunate that college costs today are so high that many kids are saddled with huge college loans at such a young age.