Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gao seng who wrote (202511)	11/14/2001 12:29:13 AM
From: gao seng	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

So what have the anti-war crowd got to say now? TERRIBLE news from the front: we're winning the war. The capture of Mazar and Kabul is deeply depressing. If the Taliban are depressed, think how much worse it is for the anti-war lobby in the West. How can something that was supposed to go so wrong go so right? The nature of the anti-war case has taken several contradictory directions to date and events in Afghanistan must surely provoke it to take a new and interesting one. Let's remind ourselves of the thwarted certainties so far. First they told us that America would "lash out" blindly. George W Bush inconveniently refused to oblige this stereotype by stopping to do a bit of military planning and delaying a response to give the Taliban time to yield Osama bin Laden a rather reasonable offer in the circumstances. They then began to fret about the evidence against bin Laden. Where's the proof that he was behind the September 11 atrocities? He had only tried to blow up the World Trade Centre once before and bombed two American embassies in Africa. People who argued this were unlikely to believe any standard of proof intelligence services could offer. So what they were really saying was that there could be no proof short of bin Laden's confession. But hold on a minute: here comes news of the latest bout of bin video karaoke. In it, bin Laden says: "If avenging the killing of our people is terrorism then history should be a witness that we are terrorists. Yes, we kill their innocents and this is legal religiously and logically." As the terrorist-in-chief has never seemed unduly keen to disclaim responsibility, it seemed extraordinarily benign of the "give Osama a chance" crowd here in the West to be so concerned on his behalf. At least he has come out and told it straight about his actions. It's the weasling contradictions of the anti-war protesters that are more troubling. Maybe they don't quite understand someone who thinks it's fine to slaughter innocents legally, religiously and morally. Maybe they think that a change in the way the West runs economic and development policies would have made all the difference. I really do gawp at this one. Do we need to reform world trade? You bet. Do we need to strip away the choosy protectionism of the US and the agricultural closed shop of the EU to help poorer countries sell their produce? Urgently, we do. Should we care about the injustices and poverty in the world and go on looking for better ways to address them? Of course. Would any of this have made the slightest difference to Osama bin Laden? You must be kidding. This notion that a spoilt child of a festering Saudi regime fleeing into the maw of annihilation has anything to do with a progressive desire to improve the planet is a one-way ticket to the moral mire. The anti-war case is as flawed practically as it is ethically. The bombing, we have been warned, would "never work" and would only succeed in strengthening the Taliban's support in the population. The events of the past two days do not look like a decisive swing to the Taliban to me. We were warned that this would be America's Vietnam along with all the other "America's Vietnams" that have failed to materialise since the last one. The West would get bogged down in a ground war, the bombing campaign was "getting nowhere". The first time this objection was raised to me was six days after it began and every week thereafter. How fast a war is good enough? I've known minor roadworks that took longer to complete than the fall of Kabul. Not intervening in Afghanistan would have been the real immoral choice. "First do no harm" may be a sound ethical injunction. But there is also an imperative to prevent the doing of further harm, which is why a campaign against fundamentalist terror must be waged from the start in all seriousness. (Independent News Service) Anne McElvoy unison.ie