Clashing catastrophes

[unhappycamper]

Clashing catastrophes
By Ellen Goodman, Globe Columnist | September 14, 2007


AFTER SEPT. 11, 2001, my husband started each morning reaching for the remote and saying, "Let's see if they caught Osama." This greeting began as an expectation, evolved into a lingering hope, and finally deteriorated into irony.

Six years later, our ritual preceded an early morning appearance by the newly trimmed and black-bearded terrorist. Thus fear descends into farce.

It was no accident that bin Laden timed his videos for Sept. 11. But then again, how fitting it was that the hearings on the Iraq war coincided with the anniversary of his attack.

The testimony was dotted with overt and subtle messages about Iraq as the center of the war on terrorism without acknowledging how it became the center. In opening statements, Ambassador Ryan Crocker used "Al Qaeda" nine times and General David Petraeus used it 17 times without mentioning that there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq before we were in Iraq.

There was nothing new in this false connection. For that matter, there was no news at all from the hearings, if by "news" we mean something unexpected: "General bites commander in chief."

Was there any doubt that Petraeus wanted to keep the surge troops as long as possible? Was there any doubt that Bush would claim to follow the advice of the man he commands and announce plans to withdraw those 30,000 troops by next summer?



Rest of article at: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/09/14/clashing_catastrophes/

[HysteryDiagnosis]

1. What will haunt this administration and all of its "retirees" is the fact

that our presence there has caused the death and or maiming of hundreds of thousands who would never have lifted a finger against America, in fact many of them could have been considered friends had things been handled differently. These hundreds of thousands include women, children and the elderly.

Too bad no one interfered in our civil war, we might have been using different currency and our oil wells might have had a foreign entity drilling and maintaining them.