Tell that to the markets. They don’t seem terribly impressed.
No? have you checked out the P/E levels lately? or last year's performance? Those markets are discounting an awful lot of future profits already.
It’s interesting that all the real successes in the war on terror have come from the quiet war, in which intelligence operatives and small military forces track down individual terrorists, usually with the cooperation of other countries.
First, nobody is going to know the real answer to this until 30 years from now. Second, it seems a bit dismissive to say that the fall of the Taliban didn't at least put a dent in OBL's training program. Terrorists need money and safe havens, like other forces. The name of the game is to work to deny them both.
Instead of moving on, after Afghanistan, to the next most serious problems and devising tactics to address them, we chose the tactic we wanted to use and looked for a place where we could use it
You would have a point - if Saddam Hussein hadn't been a very real and unraveling problem on his own merits. Pursuing only the 'quiet' (read: invisible) war while sanctions collapsed, the US surrendered efforts at containment, Saddam went shopping, and supplied who-knows-what to Answar, Hamas, and whoever else he dealt with, these were not really good options either. |
