""what would you do?""
Just picked up on your dialogue with Thirdeye but let me preface what I am posting by saying I'm all in favor of getting the terrorists by any means possible but I do not support a "carpet bombing" mentallity. The following has given me some food for thought...maybe it will for others also.
salon.com
> I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to The
Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this
would
mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this
atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What
else can we do?" Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether
we "have the belly to do what must be done." And I thought about the
issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and
even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never lost track of
what's
going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen
how it all looks from where I'm standing.
>
> I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no
doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in
New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters. But
the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even The
government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant
psychotics
who took over Afghanistan in 1997.
> Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban,
think Nazis.
> When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people
of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps." It's not
only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity, they
were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if Someone
would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest
of
international thugs holed up in their country.
>
> Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The
answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering.
A
few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000
disabled orphans in Afghanistan -- a country with no economy, no food.
There are millions of widows.
> And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The
soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the
Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not
overthrown the Taliban.
>
> We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone
Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already.
Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses?
Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their
hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from
medicine
and health care? Too late, someone already did all that.
>
> New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at
least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the
Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip Away
and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans,
they
don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over
Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the
criminals who did
this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with
the
Taliban--by raping once again the people they've been raping all this
time so what else is there? What can be done, then?
>
> Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin
Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having
the belly to do what needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of
having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome
any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads
out of the sand. What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And
not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through
Afghanistan to Bin
Laden's hideout.
>
> It's much bigger than that folks. Because to get any troops to
Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not
likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other
Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. We're flirting
with a world war between Islam and the West.
> And guess what: that's Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he
wants. That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's
all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the west. It might
seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam
and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the west wreaks a
holocaust
in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose,
that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong,
in the end the west would win, whatever that would mean, but the war
would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours.
Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else? |
