Sherry Chandler

Fred Kaplan on the new National Intelligence Estimate (emphasis added):

Worse news still is the report’s further observation—never stated explicitly but clear nonetheless—that the threat has re-emerged as a result of the war in Iraq.

The report—the unclassified version of a consensus product by the 16 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community—also notes that the threat will grow still larger if we appear to threaten Iran.

This article is worth reading in its entirety as is the Informed Comment post that links to it:

In other words, the US had al-Qaeda on the run and would be safer now if it hadn`t invaded Iraq.

By the way, I had this argument two years ago with a US counter-terrorism official. He was skeptical of prognostications that the Iraq War would generate anti-US terrorism. I told him, you can`t have a massive US military occupation of a major Arab Muslim country for years on end that does not come back to bite you on the ass.

“Al-Qaeda in Iraq” is of course just a bogeyman phrase to describe Salafi Jihadis there. But they obviously feel some kinship to the real al-Qaeda (you never want to see that) and they are threatening to get up an attack on the United States. There was no al-Qaeda in Saddam`s Iraq, so it is Bush who has created this current threat, which did not have to be there.

Items like this one—Papers Detail Industry’s Role in Cheney’s Energy Report—might tempt a body to opine that Cheney was determined to have his oil war and we lost. The losing was probably inevitable, given that the only real way to win such a war would seem to be to find alternatives to oil:

“Cheney had his finger on a critical issue,” said David G. Hawkins, a climate expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “He just pushed it in the wrong direction.”

And, by the way, it is the Republicans who are filibustering any move to end the war in Iraq (also here).

Richard Moore, from “Milton, Satan, and Now” in The Rule that Liberates (Univ South Dakota, 1994):

I think Walt Whitman may have discovered the key concept in this new program for our spiritual regeneration: laziness. To lie comfortably with the world in sensitive indolence, tolerantly accepting its ways without striving to rise above it or lay down laws for it… Whitman knew that he had to use carpenter’s tools, work printing presses, plant surreptitious reviews of his own books, even build a pompous tomb for himself—because he was a mortal man and above none of that nonsense. He was not proud and self-righteous; the visiting intelligentsia from Boston were offended by his slovenly dress and the chamberpot under his bed. He would never have given a speech, as Emerson did, saying that it was good for us in America for all those young men to have had their heads blown off at Gettysburg. He knew first hand that heads can’t be put back on again.