lostkitty, feel better now? You’ve shown that you can be nasty and obviously don’t understand parts of your post (at least in the context that you communicated them) – read your post again. No, forget it, it’s a waste of your time and I certainly won’t waste my time trying to explain to you of how what you so poorly wrote comes across.
The reason there have been no Al Qaeda attacks in the US since 9/11 is that Al Qaeda no longer needs to stage attacks here in order to achieve their political objective of bankrupting the United States. We have given Bin Laden exactly what he wanted by occupying Iraq. The recent Al Qaeda attacks in Madrid, London, and Bali were designed to force the Spanish, British, and Australians to withdraw from Iraq, thereby increasing the isolation of the US and forcing us to bankrupt ourselves that much faster. It is a common belief that Al Qaeda will attack US interests to force us to leave Iraq, but in fact the opposite is probably true. The neocon maxim of “fighting them there instead of fighting them here” is actually true with respect to Al Qaeda, although I doubt that most people who use this phrase actually understand why that is the case…
When you find yourself losing in a contest, you should take a moment to ask yourself if your opponent is playing the same game that you are.
“I am not confident that President Bush’s plan will succeed,” said Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, senior Republican on the committee.
“There is no strategy,” he said of the Bush administration’s war management. “This is a pingpong game with American lives. These young men and women that we put in Anbar province, in Iraq, in Baghdad are not beans; they’re real lives. And we better be damn sure we know what we’re doing, all of us, before we put 22,000 more Americans into that grinder.”
A Vietnam veteran, he fairly lectured fellow senators not to duck a painful debate about a war that has grown increasingly unpopular as it has gone on. “No president of the United States can sustain a foreign policy or a war policy without the sustained support of the American people,” Hagel said.
At least eight other Republican senators say they now back legislative proposals registering objections to Bush’s decision to boost U.S. military strength in Iraq by 21,500 troops.
The growing list — which includes Sens. Gordon Smith, George Voinovich and Sam Brownback — has emboldened Democrats, who are pushing for a vote in the full Senate by next week to rebuke the president’s Iraq policy.
“I wonder whether the clock has already run out,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. She said she was worried that U.S. troops in Iraq are already perceived “not as liberators but as occupiers.”
