Obama has two wars to clean up

[ProSense]

The U.S. is on schedule to pull its troops out of Iraq, ending the occupation.

Afghanistan, unlike Iraq, was not an illegal invasion, it was backed by Congress in response to the 9/11 attacks. Unlike the Iraq resolution, which specified that diplomatic actions had to be exhausted and evidence presented, the Afghanistan resolution authorized the use of military force in self defense.

The Afghanistan war was supported by nearly the entire U.S. Congress, including Dennis Kucinich in the House and Feingold in the Senate, based on the 9/11 attacks.

Obama has tough decisions to make regarding Afghanistan, and my guess is that he isn't going to ignore sound advice.

Top US senator pleads for patience on Afghanistan

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Democratic US Senator John Kerry said Monday that President Barack Obama and the Congress should not automatically grant the top US military commander in Afghanistan's request for more troops.

"We should not commit troops to the battlefield without a clear understanding of what we expect them to accomplish, how long it will take, and how we maintain the consent of the American people," he said.

<...>

The senator said that the United States needed an exit strategy and cautioned that the situation in Afghanistan had changed dramatically since Obama called in March for a new approach.

Kerry underlined that "the deeply flawed presidential election" there raised questions about whether the Afghan government can be a strong partner in a US counterinsurgency strategy or whether it is "weak and viewed with deep suspicion" by its people.

more

[DevonRex]

1. Kerry is a smart man. Thanks for the article. K&R nt

[Cha]

2. Kerry's brilliant and I feel so

confident with his vantage point in the Senate now.

[ProSense]

3. Some people

can't appreciate that. Thanks.

[wisteria]

4. Patience and resolve to get the strategy right will pay off in the end. I appreciate Sen. Kerry

leading the charge on this.

[TayTay]

5. Afghanistan has been an evolving conflict

President Obama is a wise man to listen to many sides in the debate on what to do there.

This is complicated and the stakes are very high. There are a number of very intelligent people who are advising the President and I think Mr. Obama is wise to wait and listen to all their counsel. His decision on what to do and what strategy to set will be much better because he paused to get it right.

That is what I voted for last November, someone who pauses to get it right. I voted for someone who would listen to the sides and make a wise choice. I will not always agree with every choice, but the process has been pretty good so far and speaks well of the President, his temperament and his conscience driven decisions. Good for him and good for this country.

[Oregone]

6. Evolving since 1979

Just like wine, its gets better with age, eh?

[ProSense]

7. You mean the U.S. was at war with Afghanistan before the war was launched, in 2000?

Silly, huh?

[Oregone]

8. Yeah, silly strawmen are for kids.

No, the conflict in Afghanistan, as far as the US in concerned, has been evolving since 1979. A key part of the chain reaction was initiated at that time which has led us directly to now.

http://www.google.com/search?q=carter+operation+cyclone

Its just stupid lame history. No concern of yours

[ProSense]

9. Talk about stupid.

The evolving state of the current war has nothing to do with the backgound of how the Taliban came into power.

Evolving meaning the impact of Bush's actions and the reality on the ground.

[Oregone]

10. You are correct. context and history are meaningless

Toss them in a trashcan along with science. Who cares if some of the players are even the same

[ProSense]

11. Context and history are relevant, but they don't negate reality.

Things change. Now, who are the same players?

[Oregone]

14. Seems a lot of people have unique convenient realities these days

To each their own I guess.

There are many of the same players, in case you haven't been paying attention. A quick example is the guy who kidnapped Ware used to be an asset. The people pulling the strings on the other side aren't all shadowy figures with unknown pasts and training, believe it or not.

Regardless, I imagine you will be as hawkish about this war as you are derogatory to single-payer advocates. So Ill agree to disagree with any future quips or straw men you are assured to create.

[IndianaGreen]

13. We put the Taliban in power, and the Taliban has been funded by Saudi Arabia

And the 9-11 plot was hatched in Hamburg, Germany, not in Afghanistan.

Of course, the "best and the brightest" chose to ignore how the US was seen as replacing the French in Indochina. This got us into the Vietnam quagmire, just as a new generation of the "best and the brightest" is getting us into the Afghan quagmire.

Have you seen Charlie Wilson's War? It is a rather sanitized version of a scumbag Congressman from Texas who shares the blame for the rise of the Taliban, the creation of Al-Qaeda, and Osama bin Laden.

[Oregone]

15. I saw it, but the ball was in motion beforehand

He was just a face used to sell it and appropriate funds for some amount of time. What few know, Carter (advised by the dick fuck Zbigniew Brzezinski) signed off on funding them PRIOR to the Soviet's invading, and as some analysts claim, to destabilize the country and invoke the occupation of Soviet Union (which was actually formally invited into the region to aid the government when the insurrection started).

[ProSense]

19. Hamburg was a cell.

Bin Laden and the training camps were in Afghanistan. He was the one who gave the go ahead and provided the financing. These people were on the move plotting this. This plot was being hashed long before 1999.

[IndianaGreen]

24. Hamburg was were the plot was hatched by Mohamed Atta

or did you even bothered to pay attention to the information that came out after the attack? As a matter of fact, just look at the FBI's failure to follow through the WTC bombing. Ramzi Yousef, a Kuwaiti, had plans in his possession of planes crashing into national landmarks.

Interesting article on Atta:

http://www.slate.com/id/2227245/entry/2227246/

[ProSense]

26. Did you?

The idea for the September 11 plot came from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who first presented the idea to Osama bin Laden in 1996.<90> At that point, Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were in a period of transition, having just relocated back to Afghanistan from Sudan.<91> The 1998 African Embassy bombings and Bin Laden's 1998 fatwā marked a turning point, with bin Laden intent on attacking the United States.<91>

In late 1998 or early 1999, bin Laden gave approval for Mohammed to go forward with organizing the plot. A series of meetings occurred in spring of 1999, involving Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Osama bin Laden, and his deputy Mohammed Atef.<91> Mohammed provided operational support for the plot, including target selections and helping arrange travel for the hijackers.<91> Bin Laden overruled Mohammed, rejecting some potential targets such as the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles<92> because "there was not enough time to prepare for such an operation".<93>

Bin Laden provided leadership for the plot, along with financial support, and was involved in selecting participants for the plot.<94> Bin Laden initially selected Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, both experienced jihadists who fought in Bosnia. Hazmi and Mihdhar arrived in the United States in mid-January 2000, after traveling to Malaysia to attend the Kuala Lumpur al-Qaeda Summit. In spring 2000, Hazmi and Mihdhar took flying lessons in San Diego, California, but both spoke little English, did not do well with flying lessons, and eventually served as "muscle" hijackers.<95><96>

In late 1999, a group of men from Hamburg, Germany arrived in Afghanistan, including Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Ziad Jarrah, and Ramzi Binalshibh.<97> Bin Laden selected these men for the plot, as they were educated, could speak English, and had experience living in the west.<98> New recruits were routinely screened for special skills, which allowed Al Qaeda leaders to also identify Hani Hanjour, who already had a commercial pilot's license, for the plot.<99>

link

[IndianaGreen]

27. You and your wiki

You do realize that wiki is not acceptable as a source in college.

[ProSense]

29. The Architect of 9/11 (OMG, it's an article about urban planning)

The Architect of 9/11: What Can We Learn About Mohamed Atta From His Work as a Student of Urban Planning?

Degree in hand, Atta left Germany. A few months later, over a Ramadan feast in Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden informed him that he would be a martyr. Atta did not choose the World Trade Center as a target; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mechanical engineer now commonly called "the architect of 9/11," did that, likely because his nephew Ramsi Youssef had tried and failed to level the buildings in 1993. But when Atta was told he would lead a mission to destroy America's tallest and most famous modernist high-rise complex—the apotheosis of the building type he dreamed of razing in Aleppo—he may have felt the hand of divine providence at work.

Maybe you should read things more closely.

[IndianaGreen]

30. Did you even read the point the author was trying to make?

Obviously that flew over your tiny head!

[ProSense]

35. You erroneously concluded that the title meant he was the architect of 9/11. n/t

[IndianaGreen]

36. Atta's thesis in urban planning opens a window into his motives

I met with professor Machule at his office in Hamburg, where he keeps the only known copy of Atta's thesis under lock and key. While Machule acknowledges that publishing the document would be in the public interest, he worries Atta's father, a retired EgyptAir attorney who maintains his son's innocence, would sue if the document were published without family consent. But Machule was willing to walk through the thesis with me. I sat in the spot where Atta gave his thesis defense in 1999, and together we made our way through the German document section by section. Machule translated portions of it and responded to my questions. The thesis was also heavy on visuals—photographs, maps, and sketches of proposed redevelopments.

The subject of the thesis is a section of Aleppo, Syria's second city. Atta describes decades of meddling by Western urban planners, who rammed highways through the neighborhood's historic urban fabric and replaced many of its once ubiquitous courtyard houses with modernist high-rises. Atta calls for rebuilding the area along traditional lines, all tiny shops and odd-angled cul-de-sacs. The highways and high-rises are to be removed—in the meticulous color-coded maps, they are all slated for demolition. Traditional courtyard homes and market stalls are to be rebuilt.

For Atta, the rebuilding of Aleppo's traditional cityscape was part of a larger project to restore the Islamic culture of the neighborhood, a culture he sees as threatened by the West. "The traditional structures of the society in all areas should be re-erected," Atta writes in the thesis, using architectural metaphors to describe his reactionary cultural project. In Atta's Aleppo, women wouldn't leave the house, and policies would be carefully crafted so as not to "engender emancipatory thoughts of any kind," which he sees as "out of place in Islamic society."

The subtitle of the thesis is Neighborhood Development in an Islamic-Oriental City, and the use of that anachronistic term—Islamic-Oriental city—is telling. The term denotes a concept rooted in 19th-century European Orientalism, according to which Islamic civilization and Western civilization are entirely distinct and opposite: The dynamic, rational West gallops toward the future while the backward East remains cut off from foreign influence, exclusively defined by Islam, and frozen in time. In his academic work, Atta takes the Orientalist conceit of two distinct civilizations, one superior, the other inferior, and simply flips the chauvinism from pro-Western to pro-Muslim.

http://www.slate.com/id/2227245/entry/2227246

I realize that anything that cannot be reduced to a simple DU hyperlink reference with text display is too challenging for you. Do you even read the material in the links you post, or do you just pull them out of a library catalog you have, like the ones the MFR provides for the Israel megaphones to post on internet discussion boards?

[karynnj]

44. It shows his motives for joining an anti-Western movement, but there is nothing in this

that suggests joining something like the 911 attacks. Now, the culture that would best coexist within his ideal society would not be what most (or even all) of us here would want. If you remove the repressive comments relating to women, this might be seen as against the destruction of an earlier form of the city that he, not having lived in, sees through rose colored glasses. But, on the other hand, so called progress can "pave paradise, put up a parking lot." In the US, there are many cities that years later, regret neighborhoods irreparably split in two by major high ways intersecting a previously coherent neighborhood. That was true in a town I moved to in the 1970s.

In NYC, our premiere city, a grassroots based effort stopped the approval of many highways in the 1950s.

This madness finally met its match in the residents of Brooklyn Heights. In the early 50s, Moses' plan for the final piece of the BQE called for leveling this superlatively beautiful 1840s era neighborhood of cobblestone streets and grand brownstones, many of which are on the National Register of Historic Places. The residents of the neighborhood organized protests, and unlike many of the other neighborhoods that were in Moses' way, Brooklyn Heights was well connected. The city overruled Moses and moved the freeway to the waterfront, covering it with a promenade. The controversy ignited an interest in historic preservation nationwide, and signaled the beginning of the end, too late of course, for Moses' vision of development.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the Islamic wing, there is a courtyard from a Syrian house. It is one of the most peaceful, beautiful places in the museum. Extrapolating just from that, it is easy to think of a Utopian community. But, I have also seen, in Morocco, places that sound like his description, but which teem with people and looked like a maze and at parts slums beyond anything I ever saw in the US. To me, I was glad we were then on the bus. In between, there was a home of a wonderful family my daughter lived with while studying in Sri Lanka. One of my daughter's first comments to us was that living there was like a "permanent family reunion" as her family's extended family lived in adjacent houses across courtyards. (Her reference was to my large family's annual 5 day reunion.)

The problem with his thesis is that it is always near impossible to recreate the past. The high rises, he wants to eliminate, are likely house many of better off, but not wealthy people. I visited relatives who lived in a high rise in Egypt, while the father worked on a USAID project. It would seem unlikely that there would be land and money enough to provide these people - who in aggregate have some power - with homes they could consider equivalent. (They likely would not see their homes as eyesores that should be removed as part of urban renewal.) In addition, highways once built quickly become essential or at least seem that way. In the town near me, that neighborhood which was irrevocably split is now two separate viable communities. Anyone suggesting rerouting the highway would be looked at as crazy.

This paper does not lead directly to actions like 911. It could lead to someone who realizes that what is done is done, but acts to lead as the people in Brooklyn Heights did in another threatened town. He could then have applied the urban planning skills he learned to making that town successful while preserving what was attractive in the city, but finding a solution to problems it might have. That rather than 911, would be where someone reading his thesis before 911 might expect him to end up. The question is how his anger and regret at the lost of a past that likely never existed as he saw it and which he blamed on foreign people forcing change turned violent.

[karynnj]

31. Why not go back further than that to the creation of modern day Afghanistan

with borders that represented nothing but convenient lines on a map?

I agree that knowing the history is essential, but it is also important that policy start with where you are. There is no time machine available to go back and change the decisions that have led to this bad state that President Obama now faces. The fact is that President Obama has stopped to consider a major policy change - at great political risk. Senator Kerry backs him doing so in his op-ed and he outlines the questions that need to be answered to determine what strategy will have most potential for achieving Obama's goals - which have been stated as avoiding destabilizing Pakistan and preventing AQ from having a safe haven. (In committee, it has been Senator Kerry who has pointed out that AQ WAS not in Afghanistan.)

At this point, Senator Kerry is likely the strongest voice, other than maybe Biden, against the hawks in Obama's administration who want to greatly expand the war. You might do well to at least read the opening statements at the SFRC hearings last week - or watch the one this week.

[Oregone]

38. No time machine, but history to judge what subjegating them to our will may create

Regardless, the status quo definitely isn't going to "work" period (for whatever the goals actually are, which depend on who you talk to). For a militaristic occupation, they probably need over 3X this many boots on the ground to pound them into submission, if even possible. For that, the US may need compulsory service, so its probably not going to happen. Symbolicly trickling in 20K here and there is nothing but a PR move to the US (it didn't work in Iraq...bribes did). Escalation to any degree doesn't seem like a real option.

So you are stuck between leaving and somehow saving face (and maybe still contributing to reconstruction, ie, footing the bill) or staying there and running a PR operation on them about "changing direction", which you essentially do all the same stuff but hope you fool the people living there into believing the new leadership cares about their killed off children. What can I say...Im a bit skeptical about the later option. Is there any good will left there to be salvage through development if the US cannot, with the troop levels ever ensure security to the people?

[karynnj]

46. Did you listen to the hearings?

Kerry's oped draws extensively on them and they are asking some of the questions you are asking here. Kerry is doing a great job of having a variety of voices - not all American - addressing the issues and he is asking probing questions of everyone. He is creating a strong foundation on which a case can be made for policy. At this point, the only other solid case being made is McChrystal's and his case started with the assumption that we were undertaking a counterinsurgency policy.

While I assume that the Obama administration itself will present a case for their policy when it is decided, it is good that now, when the only plan being spoken of is McChrystal's, that Kerry's oped is pointing out that there are assumptions upon which McChrystal's plan is based - and those assumptions were not tested. That kind of solid questioning and evaluating the pros and cons is needed to give President Obama the ability to make a change and defend the change to the American people.

As chair of the SFRC, this is Kerry's job and there is no one with better skills, knowledge and ability to this as well as Kerry.

[TayTay]

48. Depends on how you mean that

Most cetainly since 1979 and the Russian involvement in that country and subsequent US support for the mujaheddin.

When most people use common reference on Afghanistan, they are usually referring to US involvement post-9/11. But, if you care to debate the history of US/Russian involvement, that's fine too.

[Oregone]

49. Just to clarify...

"Most cetainly since 1979 and the Russian involvement in that country and subsequent US support for the mujaheddin."

Did you know that Carter authorized funding to the Afghan rebels PRIOR to the the Soviets responding to the Afghan request for military aid?

You usage of the term "subsequent" doesn't seem to recognize that reality. Some historical scholars suggest such funding was initiated solely to destabilize the Afghan government, in order to directly draw in the Soviets.

Zbigniew Brzezinski: "The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire."

[Political Tiger]

12. Some people just can't understand that Obama didn't create this enormous mess

in Afghanistan (or Iraq) and that he can't just wave some magic wand and make it all go away. They think Obama should just bring all the troops home tomorrow and everything will be just peachy. Life doesn't work that way. It's time for these people to get their heads out of the sand and start facing reality, which is something Obama has to do everyday.

[amandabeech]

16. Well, Lyndon Johnson might just as well brought the troops home from Vietnam in 1968

for all the difference it ended up making in keeping the communist dominoes from falling in southeast Asia.

Life wouldn't have been peachy, but then it wasn't peachy anyway.

It's not always a good idea to give away first premises.

[Political Tiger]

17. Too bad LBJ didn't have a crystal ball to predict the future for him. n/t

[amandabeech]

40. Yes, hindsight is 20/20 and none of us know what we would have done

if we'd been in his shoes.

[karynnj]

32. The better analogy would be the decision in 1965 to greatly expand the war

from 23,300 troops to 184,300. Fullbright had hearings that called the strategy into question.

One difference is that Obama has the example of LBJ and in saying last week that he would not follow a policy that is not working to save face - suggests that he learned the lesson. (His wording echoes a certain young veteran who spoke against the war.)

[amandabeech]

41. I had originally thought to write that.

However, I think that our current troop levels in Afghanistan, including mercenaries and supply train personnel that would have been military then, is a larger commitment than we had in 1965.

I also think that we have a greater psychological commitment to Afghanistan now than we may have in Vietnam in 1965 because, although many are forgetting, we got in because the organization and its leader that gave us 9/11 were or are there.

Obama does have LBJ's history to look at, and I'm glad that Kerry is around to remind him of it, because I've never thought that Obama's strong suit was mid-20th century American history and most of his White House advisors are like him, too young to have consciously lived it.

It's been hours since I read Kerry's statement, and it's very late, but the current Kerry doesn't sound as convinced as the young Kerry was that the conflict in question was completely wrong-headed in the first place.

Personally, I think that we're better off building our defenses closer to home, and leaving only special forces in Afghanistan--unless we're willing to take on Pakistan, too, because whoever we're after, and I'm no longer sure who that is, has and will continue to scurry into Pakistan just like earlier opponents could scurry into Laos or Cambodia.

We have never won a guerrilla war, and although I love history, military history is not my thing, but I'd sure like to know of a large attacking power winning one.

[karynnj]

47. All true

The only comment I can add is that the young Kerry was speaking in 1971 - which was after it was very clear that our approach was a failure and we were, in fact, just delaying the politically painful acceptance that we had been wrong. Though I agree with you that the 1964 and 2009 numbers can't be taken as equivalent, from 1964 to 1965 there was a major escalation. In 2009, we have just had an escalation and are on the verge of another one that will be twice as big. In 2004, Kerry was nearly alone in speaking of fighting non state terrorists with mostly intelligence (and many tools passed in 2001 were Kerry's written to counter international money laundering after he investigated BCCI) and law enforcement and occasional use of special forces. Even in the 1990s, Kerry was concerned with international criminals, whether crime rings or terrorists, especially those with the power to control the government in the country they were in. So, I agree that Kerry did see greater threat from Afghanistan than Vietnam.

Kerry is in a different position now than in 1971. Then his passion and his eloquence were all he had to try to push a change. Now, he has the chairmanship of the SFRC and he has the ear of the President. He still has the same commitment to "getting the policy right" that he had in 1971 and the same eloquence. The importance of the SFRC and the respect Kerry has for its history has often been obvious in his comments. He clearly sees his job as providing oversight. It may be that he sees greater real influence on Obama's decision as coming from strong arguments quietly made based on a solid case made by carefully examining the questions. (Kerry's approach might already have borne some fruit - on Stephanopolis' show, Afghanistan was addressed by Senators Bayh and Corker. Corker, a very conservative Republican did not attack Obama's wanting time and many of his comments seemed very influenced by the two hearings that he attended. His comments if anything were more thoughtful than Bayh's.)

Kerry has though said often that he has worked with, but not for Obama. I would hope and expect that if he disagrees with the choice Obama makes in the end, he will respectfully speak out.

[politicasista]

23. Bingo. n/t

[rmp yellow]

18. Do you guys think Karzai stole the elections?

US accepted Karzai as the winner today: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/Afghanistan/article6853123.ece

[IndianaGreen]

20. Karzai stole the election. The evidence of massive fraud is incontrovertible.

Our recognition of the illegitimate Karzai regime tells us two things: US will continue to escalate the war, and our fortunes will be tied to the unpopular Mayor of Kabul.

[jeanpalmer]

21. It wasn't in self defense

Neither the people of Afghanistan nor its government ever attacked the US. It was a war of aggression. Afghanistan offered to turn over Bin Laden if the US proved his involvement in 9-11. If a small number of people not connected to the government attack another country, it's hardly self defense to attack the other country without trying to secure the extradition of the suspects. There were other motives involved here, one of them being that Bush was caught asleep and he had to do something dramatic to maybe escape impeachment. He ignored working through the law, as he was required to do, and launched an attack to deflect attention from his own failures. That's not self-defense. Maybe defense of his political ass, but not real self defense.

The bombers did some of their planning in Germany. Did we have the authority to bomb Germany, in self defense?

I don't like the word games Kerry is playing. If he can't see by now that it's time to shut that thing down, he's off track. It sounds like he's willing to seriously consider sending more troops. Shame on him. He ought to be leading the way to shut down that war and use the money for health care. It's damn shame Democrats are using our money to wage war and are not offering real health care reform.

[ProSense]

25. "Afghanistan offered to turn over Bin Laden if the US proved his involvement in 9-11. "

So Bin Laden wasn't involved? You seem to believe that this decision was made in an international vacuum.


"The bombers did some of their planning in Germany. Did we have the authority to bomb Germany, in self defense?" Good grief.

Was Bin Laden in Germany with the German government providing support?

The friggin resolution explicitly states self-defense.

[jeanpalmer]

39. The friggin resolution can state anything it wants

but it was largely self-serving.

Did the US and Britain have UN approval to attack Afghanistan?

A key concept in the law of self defense is proportionalism. In the the US, if someone attacks you, you can respond in self defense but with no more force than is needed to defend yourself. For example, if someone shoves you in an argument where it's clear he is not trying to do any bodily harm, you cannot pull a gun and shoot him. If you did that, you'd be charged with a crime because your response is totally out of proportion to the threat or crime. Your action would not be considered self-defense.

If Bin Laden had acted alone in his planning, would the US have been justified in launching an all-out war against Afghanistan? What if he had acted with 10 other people? Of course not, because the response would have been out of proportion to the crime -- to launch a war on an entire country for the acts of a couple people who were not supported in their criminal acts by the government or the people.

The UN has a requirement that before force is used, a country must try to resolve the issue by peaceful means, including negotiation and other means. We have the similar requirement in our own criminal law. Any force you use in self defense has to be reasonable. If a burglar breaks into your house while you're there, you can use all force available, including deadly force, to repel the entry. This is considered reasonable. If the burglar breaks in while you're gone and you return home to find your home burglarized, you can't go find the burglar and shoot him. This use of force would be considered unreasonable because there's no immediate threat and you have the option of reporting the matter to the police to have it resolved in a lawful fashion.

What did the US do to try to resolve the matter with Afghanistan in a peaceful manner? Did it exhaust all reasonable avenues, in view of the offer of the Afghan government to turn over bin Laden? Of course it didn't.

That war was an unlawful and immoral war because the US used disproportional force against an entire people who were not culpable and because it did not try to resolve the matter peacefully. The force used was not proportional or reasonable, and therefore it could not be self defense.

[karynnj]

33. Even Feingold, in the SFRC last week, rejected the idea of pulling out immediately

The fact is that the Afghans did provide a sanctuary for OBL. Germany did not provide a sanctuary.

[jeanpalmer]

37. The Afghans did not provide a sanctuary

for him, after it became known that he was involved in a crime. They offered to turn him over. Before 9-11, they no more offered a sanctuary to 9-11 bombers than did Germany. Why? Because there's no evidence that before 9-11 Germany knew of or supported the 9-11 planning that was going on in their country. Same thing with Afghanistan. If they were unaware of the plot and did not take part in it, they were not offering sanctuary.

That same principle is embodied in our own laws. If your brother who is living with you is planning a crime, you yourself have not committed a crime if you are unaware beforehand of his plans and don't help him. If after the fact, you provide sanctuary for him to avoid capture, then you become an accessory and criminally culpable, but not before. OTOH, if you don't help him after the fact, or if you offer to turn him over to the police, obviously you are not an accessory or criminally culpable and have not "offered sanctuary."

[karynnj]

43. That is simply not true

They did not offer OBL to us. They did allow Afghan training camps and they knew what they were.

[jeffsupersaiyan]

22. IRAQ PULL OUT FOR THE WAR ON TERRORISM

lol UPDATE THEIR IS ALREADY A PULL OUT DATE. WHY ARE YOU CALLING IT AN ILLEGAL INVASION. THATS LIKE SAYING OBAMA IS AN ILLEGAL PRESIDENT BECAUSE HE WONT PROVE STUFF . ALSO BUSH SUMBITTED A PULL OUT DATE OF IRAQ . WAR ON TERRORISM NOT WAR ON IRAQ ALREADY. OBAMA DOES IGNORE SOUND ADVICE THATS WHY HE WANTS TO RAISE TAXS INSTEAD OF HAVING A FAIR TAX HE WANTS TO TAX SUCCESS .

[karynnj]

34. Using all capitals does not lend coherence to these fragmented thoughts

While it is true that Bush agreed to a timeline, it was 2 years after Kerry and Feingold recommended setting a time line to use as a lever to force the Iraqis to accelerating their effort to resolve the political issues deviding them and keeping them from standing on their own. In 2008, Kerry pointed out that Bush, agreeing to the need for a timeline, had moved to the Democratic position.

Obama has not raised taxes. In addition, I assume what you call a "fair tax" is not what most of us would call a "fair tax". Most of believe in a progressive tax.

[RJDem]

28. When he actually does it, I will congratulate him

He has already extended the time in Iraq past the time he promised as a candidate. And he seems ready to escalate in Afghanistan, despite all indications that it would be a mistake. I'm still waiting for him to deliver on his promises in regard to the war(s). We'll see. I have no blind faith in him, although I know that is not popular here.

[MadHound]

42. The trouble is that he's not cleaning them up.

Sure, he's pulling the troops out of Iraq, except for 50-100,000 of them who will remain behind indefinitely in order to "fight terrorism" and train Iraq troops. Meanwhile he's doubling down in Afghanistan, meaning that we're going to be involved in this futile, Vietnam like quagmire for years and years.

This isn't clean-up, this is becoming even further involved.

If this was a 'Pug president following this strategy, many around here who are currently praising Obama's actions vis-a-vis the war would be screaming their heads off. Instead, since it is Obama, they think this is the greatest strategy ever, killing more innocents, wasting more of our money.

Hypocrite much?

[Orsino]

45. Two wars to END.

There's no way to polish either of these turds.