America Defeated: How Terrorists Turned a Superpower's Strengths Against Itself

[Crazy Horse]

  troop hating bastards

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marmar  (1000+ posts)       Wed Mar-26-08 07:27 AM
Original message
America Defeated: How Terrorists Turned a Superpower's Strengths Against Itself  
 Advertisements [?]from TomDispatch, via AlterNet:

America Defeated: How Terrorists Turned a Superpower's Strengths Against Itself

By Mark Danner, Tomdispatch.com. Posted March 26, 2008.

America's enemies have used an evangelical, redemptive regime, hell-bent on remaking a fallen world, to lay the seeds of their success.

This essay was adapted from an address first delivered in February at the Tenth Asia Security Conference at the Institute for Security and Defense Analysis in New Delhi.

To contemplate a prewar map of Baghdad -- as I do the one before me, with sectarian neighborhoods traced out in blue and red and yellow -- is to look back on a lost Baghdad, a Baghdad of our dreams. My map of 2003 is colored mostly a rather neutral yellow, indicating the "mixed" neighborhoods of the city, predominant just five years ago. To take up a contemporary map after this is to be confronted by a riot of bright color: Shia blue has moved in irrevocably from the East of the Tigris; Sunni red has fled before it, as Shia militias pushed the Sunnis inexorably west toward Abu Ghraib and Anbar province, and nearly out of the capital itself. And everywhere, it seems, the pale yellow of those mixed neighborhoods is gone, obliterated in the months and years of sectarian war.

I start with those maps out of a lust for something concrete, as I grope about in the abstract, struggling to quantify the unquantifiable. How indeed to "take stock" of the War on Terror? Such a strange beast it is, like one of those mythological creatures that is part goat, part lion, part man. Let us take a moment and identify each of these parts. For if we look closely at its misshapen contours, we can see in the War on Terror:

Part anti-guerrilla mountain struggle, as in Afghanistan;

Part shooting-war-cum-occupation-cum-counterinsurgency, as in Iraq;

Part intelligence, spy v. spy covert struggle, fought quietly -- "on the dark side," as Vice President Dick Cheney put it shortly after 9/11 -- in a vast territory stretching from the southern Philippines to the Maghreb and the Straits of Gibraltar;

And finally the War on Terror is part, perhaps its largest part, Virtual War -- an ongoing, permanent struggle, and in its ongoing political utility not wholly unlike Orwell's famous world war between Eurasia, East Asia, and Oceania that is unbounded in space and in time, never ending, always expanding.

Snowflakes Drifting Down on the War on Terror

President Bush announced this virtual war three days after September 11, 2001, in the National Cathedral in Washington, appropriately enough, when he told Americans that "our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil." ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/80547 /

 

Demeter  (1000+ posts)       Wed Mar-26-08 07:58 AM
Response to Original message
1. True ONLY If By Terrorists, You Mean BFEE and Cronies and NeoCons

 

TOJ  (1000+ posts)       Wed Mar-26-08 08:05 AM
Response to Reply #1
2. Amen to that
 It wasn't AlQaeda that turned America against itself, it was the right wing in this country. They lit the fuse in the 90's by trying to destroy the president. Then after 9/11 (LIHOP), turned it into an all-out war between the fascists and the real Americans. Bush and his cronies, not UBL, are responsible for the death of America

Question their patriotism or whatever.............................

zonmoy (1000+ posts)       Wed Mar-26-08 08:29 AM
Response to Reply #2
3. one flaw in your post.  
 9/11(mihop) not (lihop)

 

FFS..................you bunch of ****ing coward communist loving socialist nazi bastard waste of skin traitors......................always cheering on the enemy\.................for what you dumb****s, for what...........because you don't like President Bush the 43 president of the United States of America??? Because even though he won you feel he stole it from that batshit crazy nutcase Al Gore that jets around the world polluting to tell others not to pollute\????.......

Or is it that you just ****ing hate democracy...........hate others with different views than your own..............want to live off the goverment for as much as possible and you have no personal responsibility for your own actions. Hoping and wishing that we become the run down countries like Cuba, Venezula, China, Russia......etc.

**** OFF YOU TRAITOROUS PIECES OF SHIT

[jukin]

Or is it that you just ****ing hate democracy...........hate others with different views than your own..............want to live off the goverment for as much as possible and you have no personal responsibility for your own actions. Hoping and wishing that we become the run down countries like Cuba, Venezula, China, Russia......etc.

By George, I think you've got it.

I still have a standing offer of a clean, new, crisp one hundred dollar bill to any DUchebag that renounces citzenship and moves pto VZ, NK, or Cuba.

[Attero Dominatus]

TOJ  Donating Member  (1000+ posts) Journal  Click to send private message to this author  Click to view this author's profile  Click to add this author to your buddy list  Click to add this author to your Ignore list      Wed Mar-26-08 08:05 AM
Response to Reply #1
2. Amen to that
   
It wasn't AlQaeda that turned America against itself, it was the right wing in this country. They lit the fuse in the 90's by trying to destroy the president. Then after 9/11 (LIHOP), turned it into an all-out war between the fascists and the real Americans. Bush and his cronies, not UBL, are responsible for the death of America
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if you hate america so much DUmbasses, go live in china.

[Airwolf]

We lost? I don't remember getting the memo on this? Then again like frank says DUmmies lie,they lie all the time.

[dandi]

TOJ  (1000+ posts)       Wed Mar-26-08 08:05 AM
Response to Reply #1
2. Amen to that
 It wasn't AlQaeda that turned America against itself, it was the right wing in this country. They lit the fuse in the 90's by trying to destroy the president. Then after 9/11 (LIHOP), turned it into an all-out war between the fascists and the real Americans. Bush and his cronies, not UBL, are responsible for the death of America

Nope. Sorry. It was the Left who, before the dust had even settled at the WTC, started finding ways to blame America and this administration. It was the Left who were making dire predictions of America's defeat before OIF even kicked off. It is the Left who have been blaming Bush and conservatives for every problem, real or imaginary, that the country has faced for the last seven years. It was the Left who blew all out of proportion the events at Abu Ghraib. It was the Left who has maintained a steady drumbeat of accusations without evidence concerning the war and the conduct of our troops. It is the Left who have kept up a steady stream of paranoid fantasies about internment camps, marshall[sic] law, innocent citizens having their rights trampled, and on and on, ad nauseum. It is the left who have made it their mission in life to disrupt and divide and continue their seven year long temper tantrum over their loss in the 2000 election. YOU, moonbats, have divided this country.

Personally, I'm glad. Now the lines are drawn clearly. Now we know where everyone stands. You can't hide behind euphemisms anymore. The dirty core of liberalism is exposed.

[Carl]

zonmoy (1000+ posts)       Wed Mar-26-08 08:29 AM
Response to Reply #2
3. one flaw in your post. 
 9/11(mihop) not (lihop)

Lurking DUmmies I have a challenge for what passes as a mind in your heads.

If 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush Administration then that means they hold enormous power to keep silent any evidence or whistleblowers that would result from the massive number of people that would have had to be "in" on it,including the military.

You believe that it was staged to allow the government to move at will to take away your rights yet if they have the ability and power to pull such an event off as 9/11 wouldn`t it be a lot easier to simply arrest you where you have been sitting at your computer these last 6 1/2 years.

Logical thinking isn`t your strong suit is it DUmmies?

[Airwolf]

zonmoy (1000+ posts)       Wed Mar-26-08 08:29 AM
Response to Reply #2
3. one flaw in your post. 
 9/11(mihop) not (lihop)

Lurking DUmmies I have a challenge for what passes as a mind in your heads.

If 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush Administration then that means they hold enormous power to keep silent any evidence or whistleblowers that would result from the massive number of people that would have had to be "in" on it,including the military.

You believe that it was staged to allow the government to move at will to take away your rights yet if they have the ability and power to pull such an event off as 9/11 wouldn`t it be a lot easier to simply arrest you where you have been sitting at your computer these last 6 1/2 years.

Logical thinking isn`t your strong suit is it DUmmies?

Oh look now their pointy heads will explode trying to think that one out.