WHY FLYPAPER WON'T FLY

 

YOU HEAR IT ALL THE TIME.  WE ARE FIGHTING “THE TERRORISTS” IN IRAQ SO WE DON’T HAVE TO FIGHT THEM HERE.  We Are Taking the Fight to the Enemy.  . .  Blah, blah, blah.  This is The Flypaper Theory. All this macho can do puff and huff does is hide the fact the Bush Administration can’t do the job in fighting the real threats to us because they don’t even understand them.  If the London attacks teach us anything (besides the Bush obsession with putting POLITICS above national security), those attacks tell us that “taking the fight” to the imagined enemy in Iraq will not keep the real enemy from fighting wherever they want.  This flypaper theory won’t fly.

A four letter word comes to mind about this flypaper theory.  The idea that all terrible terrorists in the world will head to Iraq to be destroyed by American might and goodness is DUMB.  GEORGE BUSH and and his flunking flunky academic Secretary of State CONDOLEEZZA RICE continue in their MONSTER POLICY that states battles fall within straight lines, within the borders of states, rogue or otherwise.  And if terrorists are involved, it is because “madman” like Saddam Hussein would take his arsenal and hand it over to someone who shares an ideology of hate. What the hell is is an ideology of hate?  And when did Bush start sharing the love in this world?   You want to talk about hate devoid of any idea or reason?  Bush is singularly focused on Saddam and Iraq, but hates to admit where that has put us.  So we squeeze Saddam, we squeeze the evidence for going to war, we put pressure on those “terrorists” in Iraq and splat!  What do we have?

We have terrorists making plans in Pakistan blowing up London!  Yeah, Pakistan.  Home to AO KHAN, broker for nukes all over the world. Pakistan, probable home to Osama Bin Laden.  AO Khan remains gently unprosecuted and gently handled by the Pakistanis. Osama runs free.  But we did get that terrorist whose identity had to be revealed on a Sunday in August and raise the terror level right after the Democratic convention.  That’s a big pile of something.  For now call it a pile of politics.

The question is whether Bush played politics with terror around the time of the Democratic National Convention in late July, 2004.  Jim Lobe reminded us at the time that ' The New Republic weekly quoted Pakistani intelligence officials as saying the White House had asked them to announce the arrest or killing of any "high-value [al-Qaeda] target" any time between July 26 and 28, the first three days of the Democratic Convention. At the time, former CIA officer Robert Baer said the announcement made "no sense." "To keep these guys off-balance, a lot of this stuff should be kept in secret. You get no benefit from announcing an arrest like this."
[JUAN COLE]

Bush has dropped a big pile of something on us for all the flies to be attracted to now.  If flies won’t take to our flypaper, maybe the reality of what Bush does will finally stick to him.

ANOTHER BOMB TO CONSIDER

Police have now revealed that the [London] bombs were made out of ingredients which are available over the counter in normal pharmacies. According to BBC sources, the chemical is acetone peroxide and has been discovered at one of the bombers' homes in Leeds. Originally, because of the size of the explosions, police had assumed that the bombs had been manufactured commercially or militarily. The idea of anyone building such weapons in their spare bedroom is naturally a chilling thought.
Particularly worrying is the fact that this is the same chemical which Richard Reid had in his shoes when he boarded the trans-Atlantic flight from Europe to America in 2001, presumably with the intention of blowing the plane up. Does this point to a complex terrorist network or simply the ubiquity of home-made explosives? Neither idea is particularly comforting.
[DER SPIEGEL]

Today we face the simple reality that small time terrorists present big problems most particularly when we engage in a leader's obsessions and fantasies rather than reality.  When a leader combines his relentless obsession with an unyielding machine of propaganda, the JUGGERNAUT  set loose can crush any understanding of what remains to be done and leaves only wasted lives in its wake.

Comments

[Missouri Mule]

Oy! What time dose the Gin Palace open?

[Randy Bull]

As we discussed yesterday, Bush's only interest in the preservation of his own power. I have a post up that rants about the danger that is out there and the fact that Bush is doing nothing to deal with it.

http://whpsocal.blogspot.com/2005/07/can-it-happen-two-things-that-struck.html

[skippy]

are we sure they aren't talking about the domino theory?