Word: iraq
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Throwing Your Shoe to give other frustrated critics of the war a metaphorical chance to raise a shoe at President Bush. The site encourages visitors to add their own images to a simple gallery of photographs showing people holding up their potential footwear projectiles to protest the Iraq war. One of the site's creators, reached by phone, did not want to divulge his name - "This is a photo project, not a political campaign, and we value our privacy" - but explained that he and a co-creator sent a few dozen e-mails about the site to friends around...
Then there's also the fact that, like most military officers, Blair is a believer in tactical intelligence. Let me explain why that's problematic: During the last Gulf war, the Pentagon badgered the CIA for things like sand samples and stress limits of Iraq bridges, the terrain its Abrams tanks would roll across. Yes, that information was nice to have, but such requests diverted CIA resources from strategic intelligence. Rather than answering the question of whether Saddam had kept his weapons of mass destruction, the CIA sent its clandestine sources into Iraq with baggies and little plastic shovels...
...wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have diminished the role of the CIA. It's the military in those two countries that collects the body of intelligence. Pragmatically, it couldn't have been otherwise. A lieutenant leading a patrol through an Iraqi village is much more likely to collect relevant information than a CIA officer confined to an office...
Whatever Blair's personal biases and inclinations are, as long as the U.S. remains in Iraq and Afghanistan, fighting two wars that have neither been won nor lost, he will have no choice but defer to the Pentagon. You can't fight over money and people in the middle of hot wars. If the Pentagon says it needs sand samples, that's what the intelligence community...
...argues that the care and feeding of the right is a way to build cover for a progressive agenda. That may be true. Obama has enunciated some liberal foreign and domestic policy ideas, such as open-ended high-level talks with Iran, a rapid combat troop pull-out from Iraq and a possibly trillion dollar stimulus plan for the flagging economy: if he plans to roll them out soon, he might hope that one or two of his putative "advisers" will support him, or at least hold off on their attacks, because of his outreach...