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

To: NightOwl who wrote (127379)	3/26/2004 6:52:47 AM
From: Sig	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Carl is mainly speaking for the oppressed minorities who are condemned to live an insufferable existence under the heavy hand of Uncle Sam. At least until the Regime changes and others will meet the same fate. (g) But it is possible for Republicans to remain remain in power for the next 50 years. Mandates from the election booths can do that- kind of scary, what? If CB had lived in Iraq he would have been first among many whose mangled bodies can now be found in plastic bags under the desert sand. Saddam did not need any damn mandates to do that. Bush had as strong a mandate as will ever be found in a Democracy that is nearly equally divided politicaly. The Gulf War was never officially ended. Failure of Saddam to disarm or to pursue WMD's or to shoot at our airplanes in the no-fly zones meant it was still "on" Saddam , the idiot, did all three. Congress voted strongly to give GWB a mandate to take military action- and he did. Even the UN Resolution represented a mandate for action. Sig

To: NightOwl who wrote (127379)	3/26/2004 7:28:21 AM
From: Noel de Leon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

"As best I can tell their strategic assumptions haven't changed since the Mohammed's day." There is an interview(Danish newspaper) with a Moroccan terror researcher, Mohammed Darif(MD), who believes that Al-Qaeda's strategic goals are the establishment of Islamic states in the Arab world. Since this can only be done by splitting the USA away from, for example SA, hence the attack on WTC. In that sense bin-Laden has succeeded in his partial goal. Few in the USA trust the Saudi regime today. MD also believes that it is a banal and incorrect conception to claim that OBL wants to "Islamitise" the whole world. OBL's ideology, Salafistic Islam, is based on 2 concepts: 1) get people to believe that there is a religious duty to fight the enemy. 2) the enemy is the enemy close by. In other words the Arab regimes not Christianity or Judaism. MD also believes that Madrid is a new stage in al-Qaeda's plan. Not only did it occur in Madrid(and not England or the US) because of Spain's close connection to the US and Britain but also because Spain had uncovered an al-Qaeda network and charged them in the Spanish courts. Finally MD points out that there are very few of the 300 million Arabs in the world who support terror. The west can help to strengthen democracy in the Arab world as a way of reducing terror by insuring that all factions be represented in the budding democracies, not just those which are friendly towards the West. He uses Japan's democracy as an example. Unfortunately, the article is in Danish so there is no point in reproducing it here. It can be found at www.politiken.dk

To: NightOwl who wrote (127379)	3/26/2004 10:48:29 AM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

But the obvious fact is that we don't know what events would have materialized had we acted differently prior to 9/11. And likewise we cannot predict the future conduct of a Saddam/Baathist regime in Iraq had it been allowed to continue. All we know with certainty is that history will pay us more visits. Hoooold on, buster. But we can make a fair guess, with a good chance of probabilistic accuracy. We can surmise that since the fully-funded means, plans, methods, and operatives were in place, probably since the time of the Clinton Administration, 9/11 would have probably gone forward as planned. Isn't this the nub of the question? All the political BS in the world doesn't change that fact. Unless and until someone shows me proof that there was something that either Administration could have specifically done to break the chain of cause and effect leading from the entry into the US of the terrorists to the time they hijacked the planes, I will consider the discussion to be so much political folderol, palaver useful only for those who have axes to grind and no interest in the truth.

To: NightOwl who wrote (127379)	3/28/2004 9:25:01 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi NightOwl; Re: "Another bit of historic do-over called to mind during our Vietnam period, was the knowledge that if someone really wants to kill the President, there's no way to stop them. Aside from the obvious concern this presents for Mr. Patton/Scott/Clarke's successors, this fear/experience also highlights the root weakness of the "police problem" solution to Terrorism. In the final analysis, you may save the WTC the first time, but sooner or later a determined Terrorist will come for it, or any of a thousand other such targets, and succeed. Nor will it matter how many civil liberties you revise or revoke. To my eye, this small nuance of human ingenuity removes the Iraq War from the perfect spiral of a Vietnam analogy simply because Uncle Ho never attempted sending suicide bomber/pilots into lower Manhattan." The historical reality is that lower Manhattan has been the target of terrorist bombers for about 100 years now. The problem existed long before Islamic fundamentalists ever saw an airplane and it will still exist long after no one considers commercial flying at less than hypersonic speeds. It's not a problem that is unique to our time, it's an ongoing problem that dates (at least) to the anarchists of the late 19th century. And if you want to call the civil war related incidents like the one at Harper's Ferry, or the post war shenanigans "terrorism", the problem predates the common availability of dynamite. I'm a "conservative", which means that I believe that the old ways are generally better. The old ways of fighting terrorism is to use various police forces, and it's still the best way. The Iraq war is considerably worse than Vietnam in that few people were arguing, 12 months on, that the war in Vietnam was a diversion from the contest with Communism. Instead, it was generally agreed that the war was a good idea, and it was only after huge casualties that the objective of the war became obviously impossible to achieve. In contrast, the Iraq war was called a mistake by many commentators, both conservative and liberal, before it even began. Yes, "sooner or later" all things will happen, but that is a fact of nature that you faced with apparent equanimity before 9/11. Were you a fool then to be complacent, or are you a fool now to be so scared? Whichever you choose, why should we trust your judgement now? Instead, we should listen to the judgement of the people who were not complacent before 9/11 (such as Richard Clarke), and their judgement, at least that of most of them, is that the Iraq war was a diversion from the war against terror. -- Carl