Potent Military Victories To Make Benefit Glorious Image of the Crawford Caligula

Here are some more shining examples of the kind of glorious military victories we've seen under this so-called "war president" who wants us to believe only he can keep us safe, and that God Himself has anointed him to protect us:

Somalia air strike failed to kill top al-Qaida targets, says US

Xan Rice in Nairobi
Friday January 12, 2007
The Guardian

The US air strike on Somalia failed to kill any of the three top al-Qaida members accused of terror attacks in east Africa.

A senior US official said yesterday that Sunday night's attack had killed between eight and 10 "al-Qaida affiliates" near the southern tip of Somalia.

But he said that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, Abu Taha al-Sudan and Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, all linked to the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and the 2002 Mombasa hotel attack, were still on the run. "Fazul is not dead," said the official, contradicting earlier reports. "The three high-value targets are still of interest to us."

So here's my question: If these "al-Qaida affiliates" were not killed, then who the heck are the eight to ten corpses? Just wonderin', is all.

In a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Mr. Negroponte also testified that Al Qaeda’s “resilient” senior leadership continues to play a central planning role from remote hideouts in Pakistan. This conclusion about Al Qaeda reflects a shift in thinking among intelligence officials, who as recently as last summer had assessed that terrorist leaders like Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri had become largely isolated from their network of supporters, reducing their role to being more inspirational than operational.

As have previous years’ assessments, Mr. Negroponte said Al Qaeda remained the organization most capable of carrying out another devastating attack on American soil. But Thursday’s testimony from Mr. Negroponte and other top intelligence officials showed a mounting concern about the threat of militant Shiite groups.

[snip]

The other intelligence officials who testified at the hearing were Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Robert S. Mueller III of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Randall M. Fort, who leads the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department.

The officials agreed that the Iraq war had helped fuel Islamic radicalism around the globe and had most likely bolstered the recruiting efforts of Al Qaeda.

[snip]

Mr. Negroponte said Thursday that governments across the region were concerned that the violence in Iraq could spill across the country’s borders and embolden ethnic minorities to carry out attacks against majority sects.

He also warned of the successes that a resurgent Taliban is having in Afghanistan in its attempts to destabilize the government of President Hamid Karzai.

So let's make a scorecard, shall we?

After the 9/11 attacks, we went into Afghanistan and ousted the Taliban, but before we could stabilize that country and the Karzai government, Bush pulled troops from Afghanistan for his war in Iraq. Now the Taliban, who gave safe haven to Osama Bin Laden, are resurgent in Afghanistan, so what is Bush going to do? Pull even MORE troops from Afghanistan to fuel his escalation of the very war in Iraq that Bush's own intelligence officials concede has not stopped, or even eased, but instead fueled Islamic radicalism across the Middle East:

As a last-ditch effort, President Bush is expected to announce this week the dispatch of thousands of additional troops to Iraq as a stopgap measure, an order that Pentagon officials say would strain the Army and Marine Corps as they struggle to man both wars.

Already, a U.S. Army infantry battalion fighting in a critical area of eastern Afghanistan is due to be withdrawn within weeks in order to deploy to Iraq.

According to Army Brig. Gen. Anthony J. Tata and other senior U.S. commanders here, that will happen just as the Taliban is expected to unleash a major campaign to cut the vital road between Kabul and Kandahar. The official said the Taliban intend to seize Kandahar, Afghanistan's second-largest city and the place where the group was organized in the 1990s.

"We anticipate significant events there next spring," said Tata.

Meanwhile, Bin Laden himself is somewhere in the mountains of our good old ally Pakistan. And Bush is "really not all that concerned about him."

Now would one of the lunatics who finds his/her way here from Lesser Wingnuttia please explain to me how, given this record, you can still believe that "Bush has made us safer"? Would you please explain this record on terrorism and explain to me why, given this record, we should let this guy touch another country, including our own?

In 2002, Time Magazine ran an article "Inside the Mind of the CEO President," continuing the meme that this president, unlike the messy and chaotic wonkery of the Clinton years, would "run this country like a business." Yes, Bush has been the CEO president all right, but the CEO he's been has been ex-Home Depot CEO William Nardelli.