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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe NYC who wrote (211434)	11/11/2004 9:10:10 AM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 1573981

"Tactics that you criticize turn Taliban from a terrorist sponsoring government into "a factor ... in the south and east"" It is hard to say what Kerry would have done in response to 9/11. The incursion into Afghanistan was a natural one, and had widespread support in the US and abroad. The reneging on our promises of funds for rebuilding and providing of security in the aftermath are not quite as popular. Letting Afghanistan degenerate into the very same conditions that brought the Taliban into power is very likely something Kerry would not have done. So would a hypothetical Kerry administration have invaded Afghanistan and toppled the Taliban in the first place? I dunno, it is possible. Al Quaida was a known enemy and had known ties to that government. Would said administration been more responsible in the aftermath? Almost certainly. Would that administration also have invaded Iraq on the pretext of fictious weapons of mass destruction? Almost certainly not. So the scorecard probably would have been Taliban toppled and Al Quaida eliminated in Afghanistan, with the possible exception of the Pashtune provinces in Pakistan. It wouldn't be a factor in southern and eastern Afghanistan. Saddam would still be in power in Baghdad. Efforts to contain him would have continued and American and European companies scamming the oil for food program would have continued. There probably would have been 100,000 less excess deaths in Iraq, minus however many Saddam and his sons managed to kill. The number of US soldiers killed probably would have been less, the casualties in doing a thorough job in Afghanistan would have been less overall, but still higher than it has been to date. Overall terrorist threat to the US and the world would have been a lot less because we wouldn't be squandering our moral authority in a pointless war in Iraq, but actually addressing real threats. And we wouldn't be giving fundamentalist Islamics a ready rallying cause to recruit more terrorists.