Another sober report from a Baghdad resident - Baghdad Dispatch: Still Hope After Sunday's Bombs.
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Al-Sabah reports that yesterday alone 327 families returned home and that the scene of vans loaded with furniture of refugees leaving Baghdad is no more. There were times when the average was around 20 a day. The 327 figure brought the total to more than 500 families across Baghdad.
Al-Hurra TV aired a report on the story and interviewed some of the returning Baghdadis, one man said “those who returned earlier and saw the change in the situation called us and encouraged us to return, and I too will encourage the rest to come back”.
Just an enlisted man in the army to inform and take back our great nation. Surrender is not an option.
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New jihadist leader in Dagestan denounces Islamic State defectors - [image: Screen Shot 2015-02-15 at 9.38.12 PM.png] The Islamic Caucasus Emirate's (ICE) leader in Dagestan, Said Arakanskiy, denounced the jihadists who d...9 years ago
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Bush and Al Qaeda
February 21, 2007
RECENT DESCRIPTIONS by intelligence officials of Al Qaeda's renewed control of terrorist networks and training camps in the tribal areas of Pakistan contrast with previous administration depictions of isolated leaders reduced to acting as little more than a source of ideological inspiration. The new picture seems to belie the triumphalist tone of President Bush, who said a few days before last November's congressional elections: "Absolutely, we're winning. Al Qaeda is on the run."
Which is it, then, a hounded, faltering Al Qaeda or an enemy that has regrouped and become a greater threat than ever? The answer is crucial not only for national security but for America's open society.
An obvious part of the answer is that Bush has played politics with the Al Qaeda threat. When it suits his needs, he inflates the stateless band of Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri into an existential threat. At other times, Bush boasts about routing bin Laden, passing over in silence his administration's failure to send enough US forces to capture the fugitive Saudi in the caves of Tora Bora five years ago.
An accurate assessment of the threat from Al Qaeda depends less on classified intelligence than on a sense of proportion. There is no reason to doubt reports from European and Pakistani intelligence agencies that, from their hideouts in Pakistan, Al Qaeda's leaders have sponsored terrorist attacks that killed people and attacks that were foiled beforehand. It is also clear that extremist groups in Iraq and North Africa have openly sworn fealty to bin Laden and named themselves as regional branches of Al Qaeda.
Nevertheless, bin Laden and Zawahiri are confronting a real-world version of the principle that every action induces a reaction. Even with their safe haven in Pakistan, they no longer enjoy the freedom of action they had under the Taliban in Afghanistan before Sept. 11. When the former leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, sent suicide bombers to blow themselves up in Amman, Jordan, in November 2005, murdering Muslim men, women, and children who could not possibly be defined as enemies of the faithful, the nihilism of that act turned millions of people in the Muslim world against Al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda has little chance of toppling any government in the Muslim world. It presents instead a threat of episodic terrorism, and it has provoked the security services of many countries to cooperate against that threat. That cooperation should be intensified and expanded, but the threat from Al Qaeda does not justify Bush's curtailing of Americans' civil rights or the government's invading of their privacy. It should never have been used to justify a resort to torture.
These are abuses of power harmful to America's true interests, and they derive from a distorted representation of Al Qaeda.
I will not argue that the threat of Islamic terror is still great. I will say it has changed and that they were clearly on the run until Pakistan appeased the Taliban and gave them their own country.
"Pakistan is in a tough position. With most of the population either enthusiastic, or supportive, of Islamic radicalism, it's difficult for the government to declare open war on the tribes providing bases for the Taliban and al Qaeda along the Afghan border. Officers have already reported that up to a third of their troops might be "unreliable" if there were sustained military operations in the tribal territory. Yet, if the government does not go after these bases, the people in them have vowed to continue building their strength until they can topple the government. Such a headache." - Instapundit
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Form the last line of your quoted story, "distorted representation".
"the threat from Al Qaeda does not justify Bush's curtailing of Americans' civil rights or the government's invading of their privacy. It should never have been used to justify a resort to torture."
This has been refuted multiple time. That is the distortion.
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