Saturday, September 23, 2006

Assume Osama is dead...

Death by natural causes. No capture, no trial, no real punishment. Ultimately brought to his more than timely demise by the classic ancient killer of centuries past, typhus, or some other such ailment. At the not terribly ripe old age of 49. Deprived of this singular moment of him being brought to justice via capture or a well-placed bomb what real satisfaction is there, other than, well good riddance?

I just cannot picture how this is "good news for Bush?" as Cavuto would say. Appropriate or not, he has become, no matter how much the Bush Administration has tried to build up others, as the singular villain of 9/11, and here the American people are with only the butcher's bill and no filet minion of bin Laden on a gibbet.

So half-a billion trillion dollars, tens of thousands dead and all we have left is a more dangerous world thanks to our bad investment strategy. For, oh yes, it has been one terrible "strategery".

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

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