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

To: Michael Watkins who wrote (151545)	11/11/2004 4:57:56 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

I guess its pointless to remind you that the 9/11 attackers did not hail from Iraq So? AQ declared war on the US in 1998, and from 1998 - 2001 the weak or non-existent US responses to their attacks only convinced them that the US was a paper tiger with no stomach for a fight. Kill a few Americans, and the rest run away - just look at Somalia! Look at the attack on the Cole - no response whatsoever! Do you seriously believe that Osama was expecting more from the US than a few more cruise missiles in the wake of September 11th? Neither new recruits, nor their leaders, are going to be any less inclined to attack the US as a result of Iraq - whether its a "catastrophic success" or not. Except the ones who are already fighting in Iraq stand a good chance of being dead. The survivors will have a more realistic assessment of the capacities of American troops, and the likelihood of American military action. And I didn't notice that our non-response of 1998 - 2001 discouraged them either. In fact, if Iraq had perfectly come about - without a shot fired and embraced each and every "coalition" soldier - do you honestly believe that a group like al Qaeda would lose one bit of its resolve? Maybe not - but they will have suffered a huge blow to their recruitment chances, if Iraq had become, or becomes sometime in the future, a decent place with political freedom. When given the choice between modern freedom & prosperity and totalitarian Islamism, even Arabs will choose modernity. Did you see the new study just out of Harvard, that concludes that terrorism does not correlate with poverty at all (a glance at the bios of the 19 Sept 11th hijackers could have told you that), but correlates strongly with lack of political freedom, esp. in countries that are moving from absolute dictatorships to some arrangement that is still mostly unfree?