"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast" -Oscar Wilde |
"The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself." -- Proverbs 11:25 |
We've always overestimated the damage we did to the Taliban in Afghanistan. We didn't close the borders there, we won the cities, but the Taliban and al-Qaeda escaped basically intact, and they've been rebuilding and re-equipping over the last five years...
This is a very strange administration, sir. But we really don't take the transnational threat seriously, the terrorist threat. We're pretty good at nation-states, but on al-Qaeda, we still have a government that as a whole, both parties, doesn't take this threat very seriously. The idea that we're going to try to do with 40,000 troops in Afghanistan what the Soviets couldn't do with 150,000 troops is a bit of madness...
The central place in terms of an attack inside the United States is Afghanistan and Pakistan. When the next attack occurs in America, it will be planned and orchestrated out of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Al-Qaeda values Iraq primarily for the entre it gives them into Jordan, into Syria, into the Arab Peninsula and into Turkey. For example, we've really signed Jordan's death warrant through the war in Iraq. But actually, the people who will plan the next attack inside the United States are those who are in Afghanistan and Pakistan...
This administration, sir, seems to be afraid of almost anything that moves. And certain Iraq was a containable country. The Iranians are no threat to the United States unless we provoke them. They may be a threat to the Israelis, they're not a threat to the United States. The threat to the US inside the US comes from al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan and Pakistan, if you want to address the threat to America, that's where it is....
...we don't treat this Islamist enemy as seriously as we should. We think somehow we're going to arrest them one man at a time. These people are going to detonate a nuclear device inside the United States and we're going to have absolutely nothing to respond against. It's going to be a unique situation for a great power, and we're going to have no one to blame but ourselves.
Labels: al-Qaeda, George W. Bush, Rudy Giuliani