Ground war isn't what U.S. wanted

The fierce combat unfolding in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan is just what the Pentagon had hoped to avoid: a battle in which superior air power and technology aren't trump cards, and hundreds of U.S. troops are fighting hardened guerrillas in rocky terrain, thin air and brutally cold weather.

The large ground assault near the town of Gardez is taking the U.S. military into precisely the sort of conditions that felled the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s and the Clinton administration assiduously avoided in Kosovo.

It also is the ground war al-Qaida apparently wanted.
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"Two Thousand Detainees"

On December 14, Rabih Haddad, a prominent community leader and religious cleric in Anne Arbor, Michigan, was preparing to celebrate a major religious holiday with his wife and four children when a knock came at his door. There stood three INS agents who had come to take him away. Mr. Haddad is now being held in 23-hour solitary confinement several hundred miles away from his family, whom he is allowed to see only 4 hours a month. Mr. Haddad has been in jail for 76 days and has never been charged with a crime.
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The Bush Doctrine: War for the appearance of purpose

In peacetime, George W. Bush would have been best compared to the amiable Calvin Coolidge. It is not peacetime, although it is certainly not wartime, either. It is that gray area Bush has badly defined as a war that may have no end, in territories that may have no boundaries, against enemies that may have no allegiances (and in some cases no uniforms). No comparison to previous presidents works, because none has put the United States in such an unwinnable corner before. A few have projected the same arrogance and the same vague certainties as Bush has in his war on terrorism. But they had competition on the world stage.

The Bush White House has none, and an "exaggerated sense of power and mission," in William Fulbright's words, is a monopoly's worst enemy.
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Bush's Bunker Presidency

In the context of such unsteadiness, the revelation of US officials ordered into mothballed bunkers might reinforce the image of a callow, frightened president who, after all, spent the first day of this crisis on the run. But is something else at work here? Odd how all of these Bush-sponsored manifestations of a nation under siege shore up the state of emergency on which this government has come to depend for its exercise of power. If officials are in bunkers for the first time in the nation's history, how dare anyone raise questions about the policies those officials pursue?
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