[lit-ideas] Re: Global warming claims tropical island

Irene, you're being silly and apparently know nothing about Max Boot except that you believe he's a neocon who has switched to your side of appeasement and defeat. You are ignoring all he's written and are relying on what I now know (from listening to your link) was a passing mention of Iran in the midst of an answer about military strategies to deal with North Korea, where he says
"I'm not sure we have a strategy for dealing with North Korea, much less a strategy for victory, or a strategy for dealing with Iran...there's not an obvious and easy answer to them and certainly just waging war is in many ways the least attractive option. We don't want to get into a shooting match with a country like North Korea especially now that they have nuclear weapons. So we have to think about more peaceful ways to promote our objectives either through diplomacy or peaceful regime change or other methods but none of those have proven very successful..."
Since you like to change subjects in almost every e-mail I will oblige you with the same. The battle over incarceration or assassination is one that runs deep in government agencies and is nowhere more prevalent than the FBI/CIA interagency conflict. In Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower the FBI side is represented by John O'Neill and the CIA side by Michael Scheuer, head of Alec Station. Scheuer came up with a plan to kidnap bin Laden with the help of a few Afghan tribesmen that were leftovers from the jihad against the Soviets (since the CIA had no assets inside al Qaeda or the Taliban security that surrounded bin Laden) and the plan ended with dropping bin Laden off in Egypt where he could be "rudely questioned" and then quietly disposed of. This made John O'Neill furious. He was a lawman and not a killer and he wanted OBL arrested and tried in America. So in 1998 he went to the trouble of obtaining a criminal indictment against bin Laden in New York (one whose specific charges were later dropped and it is believed that had he been captured at that time it is unlikely he would have been convicted).
This squabbling coupled with the bureaucratic sclerosis of the National Security Council of the Clinton administration caused them to fear Scheuer's plan could turn into a potentially bloody and embarrassing fiasco so they failed to endorse it. 

~Brian

On Dec 28, 2006, at 3:45 PM, Andy Amago wrote:


The interview is at:

http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2006/10/20061030_b_main.asp
Or perhaps you read into it what you want him to say. If both killing and incarcerating winds up in the same place, then why not try something completely different? Never happen, stay the course instead, do the same thing over and over and expect a different result.

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