Tora Bora: Blunder on the Mountain
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on December 21st, 2009 5:31 am by HL
Tora Bora: Blunder on the Mountain
Maureen Dowd, New York Times
Flying over the waves of snow-covered mountains that make Afghanistan a natural fortress and a sinkhole for empires, it’s impossible not to think of Osama’s escaping from Tora Bora as one of the greatest bungled opportunities in history. Maureen Dowd Unlike the Bushies, who tried to play down Osama’s importance the longer he was on the lam, Gen. Stanley McChrystal acknowledged in recent Congressional hearings that “he is an iconic figure.” “It would not defeat Al Qaeda to have him captured or killed,” he said,…
We Need an ‘Earth Race’ Strategy
Thomas Friedman, New York Times
Copenhagen Thomas L. Friedman I’ve long believed there are two basic strategies for dealing with climate change the “Earth Day” strategy and the “Earth Race” strategy. This Copenhagen climate summit was based on the Earth Day strategy. It was not very impressive. This conference produced a series of limited, conditional, messy compromises, which it is not at all clear will get us any closer to mitigating climate change at the speed and scale we need.Indeed, anyone who watched the chaotic way this conference was…
Ahmadinejad’s Giggle and Obama’s Cool
Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic
I am as worldly as the next dreamer, but the scales fell from my eyes, the same ones that keep finding their way back to my eyes, when I opened The New Yorker a few weeks ago and found, in a portfolio of “portraits of power,” Mussolini’s full-page face piggishly staring at me in chicly lurid detail, the very emblem of brutality made aesthetically acceptable. And when I turned the page there was Franco, in full generalissimo kit gazing coldly forward, every hair on his heartless mustache uncannily vivid in a miracle of photographic verisimilitude. Is nobody any…
What Copenhagen Exposed
David Warren, Ottawa Citizen