What had happened if George Bush had acted decisively on intelligence reports about an imminent al-Qaeda attack before 9/11? Read Easterbrokk's Alternate History for a quite plausible scenario.
On August 7, 2001, Bush had ordered the United States military to stage an all-out attack on alleged terrorist camps in Afghanistan. Thousands of U.S. special forces units parachuted into this neutral country, while air strikes targeted the Afghan government and its supporting military. Pentagon units seized abandoned Soviet air bases throughout Afghanistan, while establishing support bases in nearby nations such as Uzbekistan. Simultaneously, FBI agents throughout the United States staged raids in which dozens of men accused of terrorism were taken prisoner.
Reaction was swift and furious. Florida Senator Bob Graham said Bush had "brought shame to the United States with his paranoid delusions about so-called terror networks." British Prime Minister Tony Blair accused the United States of "an inexcusable act of conquest in plain violation of international law." White House chief counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke immediately resigned in protest of "a disgusting exercise in over-kill."
When dozens of U.S. soldiers were slain in gun battles with fighters in the Afghan mountains, public opinion polls showed the nation overwhelmingly opposed to Bush's action. Political leaders of both parties called on Bush to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan immediately. "We are supposed to believe that attacking people in caves in some place called Tora Bora is worth the life of even one single U.S. soldier?" former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey asked.
The most bizarre moment of Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ was the devil carrying an ugly baby with the face of a 60 year old. What was up with that? A lot of people have asked Gibson to explain it, and he sort of does:
But what about the ugly baby?
"Again," said Gibson, "it's evil distorting what's good. What is more tender and beautiful than a mother and a child? So the Devil takes that and distorts it just a little bit. Instead of a normal mother and child you have an androgynous figure holding a 40-year-old 'baby' with hair on his back. It is weird, it is shocking, it's almost too much—just like turning Jesus over to continue scourging him on his chest is shocking and almost too much, which is the exact moment when this appearance of the Devil and the baby takes place."
All right. So it was not the young antichrist, and it was not a mocking of Catholic madonna-and-child iconography.
I still think it didn't work very well, just like the children-turned-monsters attacking Judas detracted from the movie. But it was weird; I'll give him that.
PS: On a different note, Passion is an extremely unlikely box office hit in the Middle East. Christians in e.g. Lebanon are of course liking the movie for the same reason Christians elsewhere like it. Many Muslims, however, reportedly like it because it puts the Jews in a bad light.
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat recently viewed the film with Catholic leaders. Afterwards an aide said, "The Palestinians are still daily being exposed to the kind of pain Jesus was exposed to during his crucifixion."
Just take a look at your bank account, Yasser, and it may be a little bit harder to put on that martyr mask.
Center for American Progress, a propaganda outlet somewhat to the left of Castro, has an ambitiously named "Claim vs Fact" page purporting to show that Condi Rice's testimony at the 9/11 hearings are full of lies.
It looks rather impressive, and is quite popular in the leftist part of the blogosphere today, since people rarely check lies they like to hear. But CointelPro Tool has gone through the claims, and exposes the page as a mix of bad source criticism, outright misquotations and not a few direct falsehoods.
In her livejournal (!), a US female military intelligence specialist expresses her anger at CPA commanders failing to provide evacuation, air support or reinforcements for troops and civilians caught in an ambush by al-Sadr's militia. Very strong stuff!
Obviously, her words raise some concerns about how the war is conducted on the operational level. It also provides insight on what great courage and skill are displayed by the men and women risking their lives to rebuild Iraq.
