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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (2402)	10/3/2001 1:48:05 PM
From: SirRealist	Respond to of 281500

One friend suggested that death or imprisonment of OBL brings grave risks, so the only solution is to have him undergo a sex change operation and returned to life as a woman under Taliban rule...

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (2402)	10/3/2001 2:14:51 PM
From: carranza2	Respond to of 281500

Declaring total war is the easy part... Carrying it out quite another... Depends on who is doing what. CNN has just reported that the man who allegedly tried to slit the Tennessee bus driver's throat carried Croatian identification. The simple fact of the matter is that terrorists have many, many more options than we do. The proof is that Israel, though tremendously knowledgeable and conscious of the issue, is regularly hit by terrorist attacks. If the Tennessee incident is terror-related, it is also proof of the fact that their options are greater by an order of magnitude. I saw Apocalypse Now Redux last weekend, after having seen the original decades ago. The points the movie makes are quite pertinent to present circumstances. In one scene, mad Col Kurtz describes how the Viet Cong amputated the arms of children who had received polio vaccines from Special Ops forces. He thought it was a brilliant use of terror because it was so effective. In the sense of pure, amoral effectiveness, he was correct. Are we willing to fight terrorists using their own methods? Of course not, we are circumscribed by morality. It's the reason why the war on terrorism will never end. There will be victims on both sides of the battle lines for decades, with increasing costs to us. The costs to the terrorists are bearable to them. I'm not optimistic that the latest rah-rah will be effective.