Uh, to paraphrase Butch Cassidy, who are "those bastards"?
The only major recent terrorist attack on the US remotely comparable to the bin Laden series I can recall offhand is Oklahoma City. The scariest country in the mideast, to my mind, is not Iraq or Iran but Pakistan, where nukes are not hypothetical and we've been playing random games with bad people for 30 years or so. I'm well aware of the local tendency to equate the Arab world with bin Laden, I'm not entirely impressed with the honesty of that operation.
Yes, we are arguing costs and benefits. The costs and benefits of a war on Iraq are far from clear. I imagine Ariel Sharon thought the costs and benefits of going into Lebanon in '82 were clear and much in Israel's favor. What the heck, the actual armed forces imbalance there was probably a lot more in his favor than US vs Iraq, no complex long distance mobilization problem either, and a lot of the shells he pumped into West Beirut were captured munitions. And he had a convenient postwar regime all lined up with Gemayel's Phalagists. Didn't quite go according to plan, though, and unfortunately it cost more than a few American lives in the end, to no lasting benefit that I can perceive. |
