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Susan Page writes at USA Today that Leon Panetta, former head of the CIA and Secretary of the Department of Defense, says Americans should be braced for a long battle against the brutal terrorist group Islamic State that will test U.S. resolve. "I think we're looking at kind of a 30-year war," says Panetta, one that will have to extend beyond Islamic State to include emerging threats in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere. Panetta also says that decisions made by President Obama over the past three years have made that battle more difficult — an explosive assessment by a respected policymaker of the president he served. Not pushing the Iraqi government harder to allow a residual US force to remain when troops withdrew in 2011, a deal he says could have been negotiated with more effort "created a vacuum in terms of the ability of that country to better protect itself, and it's out of that vacuum that ISIS began to breed." It is no surprise to Panetta that the assessment in his new book "Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace" is drawing White House ire. "Look, I've been a guy who's always been honest," Panetta says. "I've been honest in politics, honest with the people that I deal with. I've been a straight talker. Some people like it; some people don't like it. But I wasn't going to write a book that kind of didn't express what I thought was the case."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:35AM
I'm only surprised that I had to get this far down in the thread to encounter a reference to Orwell.
aristarchus already said "distraction", so that was close.
E-F, below, said "divert". Again, insightful.
Zz9zZ, also below, said "seeding the mind-space".
It's good to discover folks who can see through the fog.
The GP doesn't seem to realize that life is politics.
Ignore that reality and you lose by forfeit.
...or perhaps he has an agenda and -wants- everyone to get his "information" from Lamestream Media--who do such a miserable job of telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday October 07 2014, @07:49AM
I've always thought of politics as history in the present. Most of it doesn't make the books though.
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(Score: 2) by Alfred on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:38PM
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday October 07 2014, @03:47PM
haha, nice. Makes me wonder if there are some terrible history books out there. The Tory and Labour deliberated for 18 hours over the topic. Voices were raised, someone threw a napkin at a Tory speaker. In the end they tabled the discussion and left the nation without a policy regarding the official biscuit for tea-time. The Tory on the pointy end of the napkin throwing ran for re-election the following year on a platform for biscuit regulation and lost his seat.
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