Contributors

Wednesday, January 04, 2012

In The Bubble

Seriously, what planet do these people live on?

8 comments:

juris imprudent said...

I don't know, must be the orbital opposite of the one that is inhabited by people that think Obama was solely responsible for the death of bin Laden.

Nikto said...

Santorum doubled down on his comments, saying Obama has "appeased and pandered" on the international stage and that the killing of bin Laden in Pakistan, presented as a foreign-policy success by the White House, was set in motion by the Bush administration.

As Ron Paul has told us, the proximate cause of the 9/11 attack was the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, left there by George H. W. Bush after the Gulf War. After 9/11 George W. Bush pulled American troops out of Saudi Arabia.

Bush caved in and gave bin Laden the very thing he wanted. That's the very definition of pandering and appeasement, isn't it?

Paul was booed when he explained bin Laden's motivations at a debate, and commentators like the Post's Thiessen accuse Paul of "blaming" the United States for 9/11. But Paul was simply explaining bin Laden's motivations, not justifying them.

Understanding why your enemies are attacking you is extremely important. There was never any crucial reason for US troops to be present in Saudi Arabia, given that we had bases in nearby Kuwait. The 9/11 attacks were hardly Al Qaeda's first attack: the bombings of the Khobar Towers, USS Cole and the embassies in Africa should have given us ample warning. Moving our troops back to Kuwait after defending Saudi Arabia from Saddam would have been a reasonable move.

The reason why Paul was so suspicious that Bush and the CIA were covertly involved with 9/11 was because it was so obvious bin Laden was a huge problem. The USS Cole was bombed in October 2000, at the height the Bush/Gore election campaign. Clinton intentionally did not respond at the time, because a counterattack would have been perceived by Republicans as an October Surprise to help Gore win the election.

But Bush did nothing after he took office to avenge the USS Cole. Two weeks after Al Qaeda bombed the US embassies in Africa, Clinton bombed a factory in Sudan, which was harboring bin Laden at the time. Bin Laden was then ejected from Sudan and only then went to Afghanistan.

Yet after attacking Afghanistan after 9/11 Bush sent in only a small force to Afghanistan to round up bin Laden, and this "mistake" allowed bin Laden to escape to Pakistan at Tora Bora. Bush told us that bin Laden was unimportant after the escape. The fact that bin Laden wound up living in a big house in Pakistani military town watching porn makes it seem even more suspicious that Bush didn't do everything he could have to capture bin Laden.

The conclusion that many came to, apparently including Ron Paul: Bush was either incompetent or complicit in bin Laden's escape. I'm going with incompetent, since there's no evidence of complicity, but there's tons of evidence of incompetence.

Bush's only "success" was in starting a trillion-dollar war against a tin-pot dictator who had nothing to do with 9/11 and had no WMDs. The war only strengthened Al Qaeda's recruiting until they started attacking other Iraqis, whose assistance is precisely what made Bush's "surge" work. The other beneficiary of Saddam's fall was Iran, whose allies in Iraq now run the country. With friends like these we need no enemies.

If Santorum really thinks Bush was successful, he knows absolutely nothing about foreign policy. Most likely, though, he's just spouting Gingrichian lies about his enemies hoping voters who don't know any better will just believe him.

Anonymous said...

Mark, since the change in format, the 'link' window that opens (and the window for writing) cannot be re-sized. Is that something I need to fix on my computer?

Serial Thrilla said...

Did you try right clicking either and opening up in a new tab?

Juliet said...

Yeah, what is all this business I've been hearing of late about Obama traveling around the world and apologizing for the United States. Which right wing pundit/Cult leader has been spewing this drivel?

Anonymous said...

Serial, that works for links, but not for the comment window. I don't seem to have a re-size option for the window I'm in right now.

Serial Thrilla said...

Weird. I just right click and it opens a tab in a new page. Are you running Google Chrome? That's what I use. The other thing to try is double clicking the top part of the border as you might be in low footprint mode.

Anonymous said...

You nailed it. Problem solved in IE. The name of my next band is going to be "Low Footprint Mode".
Thanks.