By now you've heard that a Predator strike in Pakistan may have gotten high value al Queda targets, and there's at least some possibility one of them was al Queda's number two, al-Zawahiri, who is at least as important as OBL and possibly, in some ways, more important.
Obviously, it's too early to get too excited yet, because no one knows for sure what we got.
By the way, to say that the focus in 1998 was the US alliance with Israel and its policy towards Iraq is just flat uninformed. Those may have been two of the anchors of the propaganda, but the decision was to shift to the "far enemy," the supporter of the governments they wanted to overthrow, over the "near enemy," the Middle Eastern Arab governments they hated. Their goal was to attack the US for its support of the governments they wanted to overthrow, for its posture, as they saw it, fighting against Muslims around the world, and for its very existence as the sole remaining superpower, the one nation standing in the way of their goals and in its very existence standing as an afront to everything they stood for and wanted to accomplish.
To collapse all of that to support for Israel and sanctions against Iraq is to so radically oversimplify the matter as to dangerously oversimplify what motivates these complex and dangerous enemies.
Comments