I wish I could personally write each of you, but instead let me offer a collective bow to you all. Your donations truly matter. Think of it as the perfect, action-packed gift for a holiday season of endless war.
In fact, if I were to offer a conspiracy theory to explain it, I might suggest that the U. You want to know what struck me? Something small. More like an open bomb bay, actually. And Saleh was even eager to take credit for those bombs we were dropping. According to that State Department document , Petraeus evidently wanted to get U. Government] personnel inside the area of operations armed with real-time, direct feed intelligence from U.
That catches the American way of war these days and helps explain why we always seem to end up more, not less involved, in conflict in distant lands. Among the places where the U. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen had visited 16 times by early and sometimes there seems to be a greater density of American officials, wheedling, bribing, threatening, cajoling, and maneuvering in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, than in Washington itself.
Collateral damage worries you Americans. Why would he worry? When his wife Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan in to run for prime minister after years of self-imposed exile, she was already pledged to a campaign of pro-American engagement. She promised to hand over nuclear scientist and international bogeyman Dr.
She also made clear that, once back in power, she would allow the Americans to bomb Pakistan proper, so that George W.
