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

To: LindyBill who wrote (30670)	5/24/2002 10:03:05 PM
From: tekboy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The grunts said they had a difficult time at first because the Northern Alliance leaders did not want them to go anywhere near the front lines. maybe they didn't want us disrupting the private side deals they were making with the Taliban/al Qaeda fighters to let them slip away? tb@nah,thatcouldn'tbeit.com

To: LindyBill who wrote (30670)	5/25/2002 1:41:04 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi LindyBill; Re: "Ben Ladens attack on us was based, partially, on his estimate that we were cowards who would not respond as we did." Re: "The Arabs still think this of us, and it makes them bolder in attacking us." If we insert military forces into Arab lands we can expect to have them attacked by unorganized forces (e.g. Lebanon, or what would likely happen if we tried "peacekeeping" in Palestine), or threatened by defensive forces (e.g. the gulf of Sidra). Other than these isolated incidents, I can't recall any attack on our nation, its or even it's military forces back to the Tripolitan conflict 200 years ago. There was some nationalization this past century, but the same could be said about every other region of the 3rd world. So if it's our objective is anything other than to keep the Middle East under a defacto occupation, we historically have nothing to fear from Arab states attacking us. *These are weak and unimportant states a long ways away. They're not going to put together a naval armada and capture and burn Washington* (like the British did), or sink substantial amounts of merchant fleet (like the Germans did), or nearly destroy one of our US military bases (like the Japanese did), or threaten us with nuclear annihilation (like the USSR did), or threaten to overrun one of our allies (like the Chinese did). It's the Arab extremists that are making a mess of things for us. Even if we conquered all Arabia, we'd still have the problem of Arab extremists blowing stuff up. In fact, it's likely that the more we show up around there the more Arab extremism arises to attack our forces there and our civilians at home. *How much do the Japanese get attacked by Arab extremists?* This is one of those fights that is strictly voluntary on our part. We can either choose to fight, or we can choose to walk away. Sometimes the right thing to do is to fight, and sometimes the right thing to do is to walk away. In this case, there are no states for us to beat up on, as far as the Moslem extremists who blew up the WTC, because we've already defeated Afghanistan. Iraq isn't run by Moslem extremists, so defeating Iraq again won't solve any problems for us. In fact, as today's leaked article suggests, it's quite possible that overthrowing Saddam Hussein would leave a worse regime (read: Fundamentalist Islamic) to grow out of the fertile ashes. This same applies to our allies, with the exception of Israel. As has been recently noted here, the Arab states have lousy armies. Correct me if I've forgotten something, but *Europe hasn't been attacked by Arabs since they kicked their butts in the 15th century*. In fact, the Arab nations were a convenient battlefield for the Europeans to fight WW2 in, but other than supplying the territory and the inevitable civilian casualties, they were not a part of the conflict. -- Carl