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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (27030)	9/13/2001 7:57:51 PM
From: Poet	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

My point is that many "liberals", including me, are horrified and really angry at the attack and fully support retribution for this-- as long as we determine with a good degree of certainty who is culpable. Liberal does not mean wimpy, does not mean unpatriotic. You need to understand this. Now.

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (27030)	9/13/2001 9:20:39 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (7) \| Respond to of 82486

I broke a promise to myself in looking at this place, and now I'm breaking a promise to myself by posting here. I do so only because I can't abide stupid ideas, especially when they come from people who aren't stupid. Nuking Mecca, or threatening to do so, is a resoundingly stupid idea. Mecca is in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is our ally, one of the most reliable allies we have in the middle east. It is a deeply conservative state with an enormous vested interest in maintaining the status quo. It is the single most important supplier of oil to the US and our allies. The Saudis do not support or finance terrorists. Individuals within the country might, but all we have to do to resolve that situation is identify those individuals and inform the Saudi government, which is likely to be very cooperative. Why do you think Bin Laden can't go home? Nuking your friends, especially in parts of the world where you have few friends, is not very smart. The most likely consequence of nuking Mecca, or even seriously threatening to do so, would be the emergence of a fundamentalist regime in Saudi Arabia, which is one of our greatest nightmares. I'm as angry as anybody else, but we need a little common sense here. The enemy isn't Muslims, generically, it is a small number of fundamentalist terrorists. Conservative Muslim states like Saudi Arabia don't like the terrorists any more than we do: if the terrorists had their way the Saud family would be hanged, drawn, quartered, and replaced by fundamentalists. The Saudis are in our boat, and we have nothing to gain and a great deal to lose by threatening them. The terrorists would be nothing short of ecstatic if we nuked Mecca: that would guarantee them an unlimited supply of furious young men primed for martyrdom. It is not an easy situation to deal with, and there will be no easy answers. Macho bluster will do nothing but play into the hands of our enemies. Even if Bin Laden does turn out to be responsible, our course is still far from obvious. Easy to say "wipe out the Taleban". But how do we do it? Bomb them into the stone age? They are already there. They have no centralized government and military facilities, no obvious targets for our weapons. Invade with ground troops? That's been tried before, without a great deal of success. Support the Taleban's enemies, i.e. Massoud? The enemy of our enemy is not always our friend. Don't you think it odd that Massoud was conducting a large, well-coordinated strike in Kabul, deep in Taleban territory, only hours after the terrorist actions? Doesn't that make you think maybe he knew what was going to happen? We will have to act, but we will have to act not only with strength and resolve, but with intelligence. I hope the people making the decisions have more of that than I'm seeing on this thread.