This is regarding an opinion written by
Ms. Rosa Brooks, a well-educated woman in the thick of Washington D.C. and its university
community.
Bush's booby traps for Obama - L.A. TimesThe Bush administration is leaving behind foreign policy tripwires that could blow up on the next president.... every new president is "tested" by national security crises, some predictable, some not. And I'm a lot less worried about the tests "the world" may offer Obama than about the national security booby traps the Bush administration is leaving behind for him.
On Iraq: We can't leave behind a stable Iraq without the cooperation of Iraq's neighbors, but this week's cross-border raid by Iraq-based U.S. troops into Syrian territory led Syria to break off high-level diplomatic contacts with U.S. officials -- contacts that had only recently been resumed. Heated negotiations over the future status of U.S. forces in Iraq have further increased tensions with Syria, Iran and the Iraqi government, which fear permanent U.S. military activities in the region. The current impasse in status-of-forces negotiations also threatens to leave U.S. troops in Iraq with no legal basis for their presence when their United Nations mandate expires Dec. 31. Happy New Year, Barack!
On Afghanistan: The Bush administration... mostly ignored Afghanistan for... six years. Meanwhile, the Taliban reconstituted itself, Al Qaeda leaders slipped away into Pakistan's ungoverned tribal regions. According to the latest national intelligence estimate, Afghanistan is now in a possibly irreversible "downward spiral."
On Pakistan-Afghanistan: Increasingly, U.S. forces have sought to reduce violence inside Afghanistan by staging cross-border counterattacks against suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda targets based inside Pakistan. Tactically, there's some logic to this. Strategically, not so much.
Pakistan has never been a paragon of stability, and years of unconditional Bush administration military aid for Pervez Musharraf's repressive government made things worse. Now, with the Bush administration increasingly violating Pakistani sovereignty with cross-border strikes, relations between the United States and the new government of Asif Ali Zardari are more tense than ever.
Aside from the L.A. Times (again) giving the election to Obama a full five days prior to Election Day, this piece is full of one-eyed (that is, decidedly biased) commentary. Rosa Brooks is not impressing me with her intellegence. She disappoints me with it. She is terribly biased. And by terribly, I mean she's "called in" her opinion in this piece. Someone with her edu and credentials could actually write solid journalistically appealing pieces, but instead she wrote this. Gag.
Amazingly, this was written five days before Election Day (early voting exists, but it won't truly count until after Election
Day). She's among those getting their coronation gowns ready. As if there's a landslide afoot. Not sure a roughly 48-43% race is a
landslide. Not in this country, yet. (And the liberals wonder why the conservatives throw around terms like Socialist, when a fairly tight
race is still afoot and they are pretty much impatiently waiting to go to the parties. This couldn't be much closer to a Venezuelan election
unless the state controlled the media.)
Interesting that, seeing the NIE isn't even released yet, she can see it and even exaggerate from it: saying something is in an "irreversible 'downward spiral'" is apparently a favorite saying among those who live in cushy houses in very safe 'hoods with excellent health coverage (dental, eye, catastrophic, ...). Glass houses, those are not. Well protected, from reality and risk, it would appear.
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Pakistan agrees Sharia law deal | BBC NEWS | South Asia he needed more information on the deal but that the situation in Swat had "deeply affected the people of Pakistan, not just in Peshawar but in Lahore and in Islamabad".
