zenpundit.com

” WHAT ABOUT THE WAR ON TERROR DEPARTMENT” For those who frequently complain that Iraq is distracting the administration from hunting down al Qaida, which no longer has a base of operations to allow it to gather in military formations large enough to target with B-52 ‘s and Daisy-cutters, the following from the Washington Post:

“Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, was captured Saturday in a raid in Pakistan involving U.S. agents, officials told The Associated Press.

“It’s hard to overstate how significant this is,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said. “It’s a wonderful blow to inflict on al-Qaida.”

Pretty neat work for a bunch of cynical, empire-building, neoconservative, zionist, Big Oil men eh ? I expect this will pass without much celebration on the leftist antiwar blogs.

EMPIREWATCH Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor-in-chief of the NATION magazine on Chris Matthews this morning. Clad in a mod-looking leather jacket and sharp black turtleneck, Vanden Heuvel claimed that the pending war with Iraq is ” a turning point ” for this nation in terms of becoming an empire and dismissed the President’s policy for democracy in post-Saddam Iraq as a cynical gesture. Setting aside the inherent weirdness of hearing the same rhetoric coming from the NATION as from Pat Buchanan, I think Vanden Heuvel is wrong regarding our intentions to establish democratic norms abroad. Since it is a position I have advocated in the past I’m pleased to sdee the Bush administration move past the State Department and foreign policy elite preference for a Baathist-lite replacement for Saddam – a preference shared by France, Germany,Russia,the Saudis, Turkey and much of the autocratic Arab world. Genuine democracy and – importantly – a commitment to bringing American-style individual rights to Iraq will also send a message to Arafat that the U.S. is serious about not being a midwife to establishing a PLO dictatorship when an independent Palestine becomes a reality.