Bombing at Peshawar bazaar coincides with Hillary Clinton’s visit to country91 93 100 killed in blast at crowded Pakistan market
Fayaz Aziz / ReutersResidents, rescue workers and security officials sort through the rubble after a bomb explosion in Peshawar, Pakistan, on Wednesday.updated 53 minutes ago
PESHAWAR, Pakistan – A car bomb tore through a busy market in northwestern Pakistan on Wednesday, killing 91 people as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited the country and pledged American support for its campaign against Islamist militants.More than 200 people were wounded in the blast in the main northwestern city of Peshawar, the deadliest in a surge of attacks this month. The government blamed militants seeking to avenge an army offensive launched this month against al-Qaida and Taliban in their stronghold close to the Afghan border.
The attack was timed to coincide with the Secretary of State’s visit; it was meant to send a statement.
In his campaign, Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) made some promises concerning how he would conduct American foreign policy:
Secure loose nuclear materials from terrorists:
Obama and Biden will secure all loose nuclear materials in the world within four years, and will negotiate a verifiable global ban on the production of new nuclear weapons material to curb the spread of nuclear weapons.
Barack Obama will pursue tough, direct diplomacy without preconditions to end the threat from Iran:
Obama and Biden will present the Iranian regime with a clear choice. If Iran abandons its nuclear program and support for terrorism, they would offer incentives like membership in the World Trade Organization. If Iran continues its troubling behavior, Obama and Biden will step up our economic pressure and political isolation.
Renew American diplomacy:
Obama and Biden will renew American diplomacy to meet the challenges of the 21st century. They will rebuild our alliances. And they would be willing to meet with all nations, friend and foe, to advance American interests.
Well, Senator Obama has been President Obama for nine months and eight days now; 19.23% of his term has already passed. At what point should we cease seeing Americans and American foreign policy hated by the good, noble, innocent people of the Muslim world? How much more of Mr Obama’s term has to pass before he becomes responsible for other people’s reactions to it?
Here we have a Muslim born in Kenya¹ our first black president, who made an outreach to Muslims, and who appointed the wife of our last well-liked Democratic president to be Secretary of State, sending her to the region. Shouldn’t we be feeling the love by now?
Secretary Clinton spoke about te attacks:
But still I wonder: if these brutal terrorist groups exist because of the wicked and imperialistic foreign policy of George Bush, why are they still here, why haven’t they vanished now that the enlightened President Obama has taken office?
_________________________
¹ – This was a joke, people.
Simple explanation. Obama’s escalating drone attacks in Pakistani territory. Naturally, should any of these drone attacks kill civilians, it’ll radicalize someone out in the Pakistani hinterlands.
So do the drone attacks do more harm than good? Who knows – are the terrorists we’re taking out capable of doing more damage than the terrorists we’re creating by attacking?
Oh yeah, and let’s also not forget the role of internal Pakistani politics here. The people in the tribal lands probably resent being ruled by the Indus Valley majority to some extent.
But still I wonder: if these brutal terrorist groups exist because of the wicked and imperialistic foreign policy of George Bush, why are they still here, why haven’t they vanished now that the enlightened President Obama has taken office?
“But still I wonder: if these raging house fires exist because of the last fire chief was an incompetant fool, why are they still here, why haven’t they vanished now that the new fire chief has taken office?
The Phoenician thought he was being clever, but he actually made my point: the existence of terrorists and Islamists does not hinge on who is President of the United States — and that means that, sorry, but y’all can’t blame George Bush.
The real question is: how do we deal with the threat posed by fundamental politicized Islam? President Bush had a fairly simple plan: kill as many of them as we can. President Obama’s notions are different: speak nicely to them, and maybe they won’t hate us so much.
President Bush’s plan was the wiser one.
Dana Posted:
Is President Obama’s foreign policy making a difference yet?
In the words of Fred Armisen portraying BO on SNL a few weeks ago – Zip and Squat!
Barack Obama has his work cut out for him.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGHjFgUOxYI
Ted Rall makes Keith Olbermann look sane. And that’s saying a lot!
Dana,
I don’t think Obama’s foreign policy is really that if we “speak nicely to them” (the radicals) that they will back off. His foreign policy seems to be aimed at severely curtailing American hegemony abroad, and, because of a reduced American profile, the radicals will find someone else to target. I don’t think it’s a very smart strategy, but it seems to be what many on the left want, with more apologies, reductions in American nukes, greater reliance on diplomacy whether it gains America any of it’s goals or not, and so on.
My fear is that this approach to foreign affairs–call it the “anti-American exceptionalism,” if you will–will not gain the U.S. any significant achievements (outside of 5 Norwegians, there doesn’t seem to be any appreciable difference in the way the rest of the world looks at us), and it will, instead, make us a bigger target to radicals who consider us corrupt and soft.
The real question is: how do we deal with the threat posed by fundamental politicized Islam? President Bush had a fairly simple plan: kill as many of them as we can.
And when you’ve done that (with collateral damage), you’ll have to kill the moderate Muslims as well, because they will be fighting you.
And when you’ve done that (with collateral damage), you’ll have to kill the liberal Muslims, the Hindus and Buddhists as well, because they will be fighting you.
And when you’ve done that (with collateral damage), you’ll have to kill the European Christians, the Canadians and Mexicans as well, because they will be fighting you.
And when you’ve done that (with collateral damage), you’ll have to kill the liberal and moderate Americans as well, because they will be fighting you.
And when you’ve done that (with collateral damage), you’ll have to kill the sane conservatives as well, because they will be fighting you.
And when you’ve done that (with collateral damage), the two or three of you left standing will suffocate in the stench of the dead bodies.
I get what Pho’s going on about: If we fight back against guys who are trying to kill us, it might make their pals mad. Leftists the world over hear the voice of wisdom.
Conservatives hear victims making excuses for their executioners.
To take the Phoenician’s fire chief analogy further, when George Bush was starting out as our fire chief, we had one big, big, big fire here. He went to work, got a whole lot more smoke detectors installed around our neighborhood, and all of the rest of the fires occurred a few towns away. Fire Chief Bush sent firemen and firetrucks to fight the fires in those other towns, to try to keep them from spreading out of control and sending sparks onto the rooftops in his home town, and his hometown had no more fires.
Now Barack Obama is our fire chief. We still have all of those smoke detectors the previous fire chief put in place, so the current one has a head start on fires in the home town. He, too, is sending firemen and firetrucks to fires a few towns away, but recently there seem to have been a few more fires in those towns than there were before. We’ll see if Fire Chief Obama is successful in helping the fire departments in those other towns getting better fire prevention mechanisms in place, or whether he’ll see more and larger fires.
And if it turns out our fire trucks are spraying gasoline instead of water… Send 40,000 more engines.
<a href=”Pity the poor“>Pity the poor Kalash, then.
That’s what happens when you have no power over your own destiny.
By the way, in looking for a couple of good up-to-date links to images of the Kalash (to replace my several year’s old ones), I notice that they have progressively become rhetorical fodder for every Internet racialist nutcase with an ethnic axe to grind; from anti-Jewish or anti-Neocon types, to Aryanists, to of all things, Celtic racialists attacking British National Party racialists for claiming that they are “British”.
What a deal. A few thousand aboriginal south asians inhabiting the mountains of Pakistan, some of whom are comparatively fair and gain attention in part because of it, become the obsession for a significant percentage of the world’s nutcases.
If we fight back against guys who are trying to kill us
Pardon me, but that’s not what Dana said.
Dana said “Kill all the fundamentalist Muslims we can because they’re a threat”. He was, in fact, advocating genocide.
Dana’s Headline:
Bombing at Peshawar bazaar coincides with Hillary Clinton’s visit to country
100 killed in blast at crowded Pakistan market
Amazing how these so called fighting men of the Taliban and Al-Q always kill the weakest among them. Another story to this said most of the dead were women and children. How do you deal with so called people (read animals) of a religion that allegedly claims peace, and in many places does, can kill women and children so easily.
Amazing how these so called fighting men of the Taliban and Al-Q always kill the weakest among them. Another story to this said most of the dead were women and children. How do you deal with so called people (read animals) of a religion that allegedly claims peace, and in many places does, can kill women and children so easily.
Gaza’s day of carnage – 40 dead as Israelis bomb two UN schools:
Declassified documents point to US war crimes in Iraq :
What? All two of them?
Anyway, sarcasm aside, your whole post is ridiculous. It’s like saying “Let’s not bomb the Nazis, because then the moderate Germans will be mad at us, too”. It’s pure left wing surrenderist drivel.
Pho crying crocadile tears:
Israel’s assault on Gaza has exacted the bloodiest toll of civilian lives yet, when the bombing of UN schools being used as refugee centres and of housing killed more than 50 people, including an entire family of seven young children.
The UN protested at a “complete absence of accountability” for the escalating number of civilian deaths in Gaza, saying “the rule of the gun” had taken over. Doctors in Gaza said more than 40 people died, including children, in what appears to be the biggest single loss of life of the campaign when Israeli bombs hit al-Fakhora school, in Jabaliya refugee camp, while it was packed with hundreds of people who had fled the fighting.
So what I think you are saying is Israel has no right of defense. That Hamas can send a thousand rockets a day, and the Israelis have to stand there and say look at those crazy terrorists. Let’s send a note of thanks for blowing us up. But if Israel fires one rifle volley back, Pho screams look at those barbarians. You have one warped mind there.
The Phoenician points to this story:
That’s what happens when the brave Palestinian freedom fighters hide amongst civilians.
It should be noted that that story is from January of 2007, long after Israel completely evacuated the Gaza Strip. All Israeli settlers had been removed — some forceably — by the government of then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and Gaza was the Palestinians’, free and clear, to govern as they wished. In effect, the Palestinians had won in Gaza, had that part of their homeland all theirs. All that they had to do to keep it was to not use it as a staging area for rocket attacks on Israel and kidnapping of Israeli soldiers. The Palestinians could, quite literally, have won their war to secure Gaza and the West Bank as their own nation is they had just stopped fighting.
That, they could not do. Instead, Hamas used the evacuated Gaza to launch rockets against Israeli border towns, and kidnapped an Israeli soldier. Israel responded to the attacks as anyone would have known she would: with deadly force. The brave Hamas fighters, knowing that a deadly reprisal was coming, chose to hide amongst the civilian population. Our friends on the left, naturally, blame the Israelis for the deaths of the civilians.
I think of the Hamas fighters as small men, who step out and try to sucker-punch a much bigger man, and then, when the bigger guy turns around, the littler attacker runs to hide behind his wife and kids.
Sharon: I don’t think Obama’s foreign policy is really that if we “speak nicely to them” (the radicals) that they will back off. His foreign policy seems to be aimed at severely curtailing American hegemony abroad, and, because of a reduced American profile, the radicals will find someone else to target.
Right neighborhood, wrong house. The idea behind the left’s foreign policy theory is that attacks, while they kill radicals and can neutralize immediate threats, also can be used as propaganda to radicalize others. The Economist paraphrases McChrystal’s concept of “counter-insurgency math” (of course, being British, they spelled it “maths”):
The idea behind liberal foreign policy is to make that math work for us. Attack the threats, but do so carefully, lest we end up with a 10-2=20 situation where we’ve radicalized victims (or families of victims) of ill-conceived attacks. Use diplomacy and appeals to the non-radicalized population in order to get ourselves into more 10-2=0 situations. In short, realize that while there are situations where attacks might be preferable, in many cases attacking threats ends up, perversely enough, creating bigger, worse threats.
(McChrystal, of course, is no liberal, but that’s illustrative of how most liberals think, so I included the quote.)
Oh grumble. Ignore the italics that ate my comment.
Of course, if Hamas hadn’t been firing missiles at Israeli civilians, none of this would have happened. More to the point – had the Palestinians not waged a decades long war of terrorism against Israelis, none of this would have happened.
The idea behind the left’s foreign policy theory is that attacks, while they kill radicals and can neutralize immediate threats, also can be used as propaganda to radicalize others.
This is, in fact, what the Pentagon itself says.
Wingnuts, not being very smart, tend to ignore this fact.
That’s what happens when the brave Palestinian freedom fighters hide amongst civilians.
It should be noted that that story is from January of 2007, long after Israel completely evacuated the Gaza Strip. All Israeli settlers had been removed — some forceably — by the government of then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and Gaza was the Palestinians’, free and clear, to govern as they wished. In effect, the Palestinians had won in Gaza, had that part of their homeland all theirs. All that they had to do to keep it was to not use it as a staging area for rocket attacks on Israel and kidnapping of Israeli soldiers. The Palestinians could, quite literally, have won their war to secure Gaza and the West Bank as their own nation is they had just stopped fighting.
That, they could not do. Instead, Hamas used the evacuated Gaza to launch rockets against Israeli border towns, and kidnapped an Israeli soldier. Israel responded to the attacks as anyone would have known she would: with deadly force. The brave Hamas fighters, knowing that a deadly reprisal was coming, chose to hide amongst the civilian population. Our friends on the left, naturally, blame the Israelis for the deaths of the civilians.
Uh-huh:
Congratulations – you’re at the same level of moral logic as Osama bin Laden.
And where did this pinhead get the “millions of dead” figure? Left wing propaganda.
Congrats left wingers for helping our enemies by filling them with lies.