Just as I always suspected, Bush let bin Ladin get away

Here's the news story:

Osama bin Laden was unquestionably within reach of U.S. troops in the mountains of Tora Bora when American military leaders made the crucial and costly decision not to pursue the terrorist leader with massive force, a Senate report says.

Here's the report:

It seemed only a matter of time before U.S. troops and their Afghan allies overran the remnants of Al Qaeda hunkered down in the thin, cold air at 14,000 feet.
Bin Laden expected to die. His last will and testament, written on December 14, reflected his fatalism. ‘‘Allah commended to us
that when death approaches any of us that we make a bequest to parents and next of kin and to Muslims as a whole,’’ he wrote, according to a copy of the will that surfaced later and is regarded as authentic. ‘‘Allah bears witness that the love of jihad and death in the cause of Allah has dominated my life and the verses of the sword permeated every cell in my heart, ‘and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together.’ How many times did I wake up to find myself reciting this holy verse!’’ He instructed his wives not to remarry and apologized to his children for devoting himself to jihad.
But the Al Qaeda leader would live to fight another day.

Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

So in New York we are destroying our environment to get hydrocarbons to release into the environment for global warming.

Meanwhile, just across the Atlantic:

Can we get any crazier than this? Homo sapiens' suicide!

So did somebody disable me on YouTube? or what?

Comments I mad about the video below just won't come up. WTF? I commented on the guy's other video and that worked OK.

If he'd "just had a little more time"? "You did not die in vain"?

What really happened

"a complex, smart, sensitive, eloquent, and questing figure far different than the stereotypical hardass football jock"

From Pat's brother

From Wikipedia

The video I was trying to comment on:



But then there's good old Red State Update:

Hateful and ignorant? That's it? We get called hateful and ignorant about a hundred times on every video we put up. They might as well send a bunch of YouTube commenters over to give a speech in Egypt.

a must read article on Afghanistan

By Christopher Booker
Published: 6:47PM GMT 14 Nov 2009

What we are hardly ever told about Afghanistan is that it has been for 300 years the scene of a bitter civil war, between two tribal groups of Pashtuns (formerly known as Pathans). On one side are the Durranis – most of the settled population, farmers, traders, the professional middle class. On the other are the Ghilzai, traditionally nomadic, fiercely fundamentalist in religion, whose tribal homelands stretch across into Pakistan as far as Kashmir.

It may already be the best we can do, to just cut a deal with the Taliban: hand over bin Ladin and his co-conspirators, promise not to attack us, and we'll stop attacking you.

It may already be too late for that. Al-Qa'ida's doctrine of aggressive jihad may have completely won the local hearts and minds away from the more traditional doctrine of defensive jihad. In which case we are stuck, having already taken the tar-baby option.

Obama in Japan, mulling Afghanistan

This just in from the AP news service:

TOKYO – President Barack Obama aims Friday to shore up relations with a new Japanese government vowing to be more assertive with its U.S. ally, even as he grapples with sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan.

The good news is that he could be trying to get input from the Japanese, who are important allies of the United States.

The bad news is that the Japanese will not know much. Power behind the throne (very Japanese way of doing things) Ozawa recently said, according to the Japan Times:

Christianity "is an exclusive, self-righteous religion. Western society, whose background is Christianity, has been stuck in a dead end,"

As you can probably imagine, Mr. Ozawa knows even less about Islam than he does about Christianity.

This blog doesn't object to the impolitic nature of his remarks, but it does reject their incorrectness. Bigotry is bigotry, whether directed against Islam, Judaism, Buddhism or Christianity. The really sad part is that bigoted remarks about other peoples are not considered a problem in Japan. When is Japan going to take its international responsibilities seriously enough to learn something about the outside world besides technology and economics?