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

To: frankw1900 who wrote (30730)	5/25/2002 10:40:11 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi frankw1900; Those are individuals attacking. There is a huge difference between that and an attack by a state. To control the rate at which individuals attack you, you put pressure on the other government to control its citizens. Since no government has total control of its citizens, they will be unable to prevent all individual acts of violence, but that is all you can hope for. This is the normal situation. For example, the US government, is definitely against individual American's acts of violence against Arabs living in the US. But it is not possible for the US government to completely halt such attacks. It is obvious to a lot of us that various Arab nations could possibly do more to control their citizens' violent actions towards the US. Saudi Arabia is a great example of this. But since the Islamic extremists are already being regularly captured and executed by the Saudi government, what more are we going to expect from them? Do we really want the Saudi government to be more controlling of its citizens than it already is? I don't think that it is realistically possible for us to ask the Saudis to do much more than they are already doing. If a nation simply refuses to keep their citizens in line (example Afghanistan), then we are well within our rights to attack that country (as we did). We can then replace the government with a new one that doesn't promote terrorism against us. With Afghanistan, this is an option that we took and it appears to be working. But this is not the situation with Iraq. No Iraqi nationals appear to be connected to the attack on the WTC. If the Bush administration knew of any such connection we would all now be aware of it, as they would use it as justification for their desired attack on Iraq. But no such connection has been made. Even if they were keeping it secret (for some motive that I cannot fathom), the truth would have leaked by now. But no leaks. Conclusion: Iraq is keeping its nose clean. Since Iraq (just like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and some other Arab states) is fighting Islamic extremists itself, the apparent fact that Iraq is not involved with helping the Islamic extremists attack the US is understandable. Right now the regime in Iraq is killing Islamic extremists without mercy. It is highly doubtful that we could install a regime that would be less friendly to Islamic extremists. Consequently, as far as Islamic extremism goes, the current situation is about as good as we can get. -- Carl