April 08, 2008
There was once a blog called Joe Biden Is Thugged Out. (I swear this is true.) Biden just proved why. He asked Ryan Crocker, who used to be ambassador to Pakistan, whether it would be better for U.S. interests to go after Al Qaeda on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border or Al Qaeda in Iraq.Crocker, in an impossible political position -- give the correct answer and humiliate the Bush administration; give the administration's answer and look like a fool -- dodged as much as he could. Then Biden forced him down. Crocker: "I would therefore pick Al Qaeda on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border."
Biden "forced him down" how, exactly?
Clearly Ackerman, the flickering bulbs at Think Progress and other gloating liberals didn't actually hear how Crocker responded.
Let's go to the videotape:
BIDEN: Mr. Ambassador, is Al Qaeda a greater threat to US interests in Iraq, or in the Afghan-Pakistan border region?CROCKER: Mr. Chairman, al Qaeda is a strategic threat to the United States wherever it is--
BIDEN: Where is most of it? If you could take it out, you had a choice, the Lord Almighty came down and sat in the middle of the table there, and said, 'Mr. Ambassador, you can eliminate every al Qaeda source in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or every al Qaeda personnel in Iraq, which would you pick?'
CROCKER: Well, given the progress that has been made against al Qaeda in Iraq, the significant decrease in its capabilities, the fact that it is solidly on the defensive and not in a position as far--
BIDEN: Which would you pick?
CROCKER: I would therefore pick Al Qaeda in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area.
So despite the cleverly truncated quote at Think Progress (seriously, when are lefty bloggers going to tire of being set up and used as fools by these shills?) and Ackerman's own deceptive forgetfulness, what Crocker actually told Biden is that our military had severely damaged the operational capabilities of al Qaeda in Iraq (by 75-percent in the last year alone, according to the Iraqi Interior Ministry) and knocked it into a defensive posture where it is far less of a threat.
How much less of a threat?
According to StrategyPage.com, Osama bin Laden admitted defeat in Iraq on Oct 22, 2007, a sentiment that Marine Colonel Richard Simcock shared contemporaneously as it related to al Qaeda's former strongholds in al Anbar in specific. Battered, tattered, and lethally-harassed by coalition soldiers at night and former Sunni Iraqi allies during the day, al Qaeda's morale in Iraq is crushed, along with most of it's capabilities.
Thanks to Iraqi and coalition efforts, Al Qaeda in Iraq is beaten, fragmented, and on the verge of a final collapse, according to the terror organization itself. With this enemy almost defeated, it is only common sense that Crocker would select the remaining al Qaeda hiding along the Afghan-Pakistani border as being the greater threat.
I guess Ackerman can pretend that Crocker's quite logical response--to advocate the targeting the terrorists that are still alive, instead of those we have already dispatched--is humiliating to the Bush administration, but outside his insular nutroots community, in a land where common sense prevails and truncated quotes are not swallowed at face value time and again, Crocker got the better of this exchange by merely pointing out that we've run out of al Qaeda in Iraq to kill.
Posted by: Confederate Yankee at
11:44 PM
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