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

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (173904)	11/1/2005 10:09:22 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

You seem a bit confused. I'm not talking about appeasement. And just because terrorists are active somewhere, does not mean the mainstream have accepted militant Islam there- if that were true, we could say the US had "accepted" it. The reason militant Islamists are terrorists is because the people in the ME in the countries I listed (and many more) have NOT accepted the ideas of the Islamists. Pushing the man in the street in to the arms of the Islamists does not seem to be all that bright an idea to me- and being against that has nothing to do with appeasement.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (173904)	11/2/2005 10:17:56 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Hawkmoon; Re: "I don't believe that appeasing this threat will solve the problem. Appeasement is nothing more than a more evidence that we're weak and decadent and that it's now time for the Armies of Allah to defeat the Armies of Satan." This is all well and good, but the US military can't solve this problem. It's been 4 years and they still haven't found Osama bin Laden. It's like you're trying to kill flies with automatic weapons. Every now and then you get one, but the destruction you create breeds more than you kill. The correct weapon to fight terrorism is the police. Re: "And if we show weakness, we'll only prove them right." But the truth is that we are weak. Iran is threatening to build nukes and we are so in over our head in Iraq that we're basically ignoring them. A few years ago you guys were talking about Iraq, then Iran, then Syria, then Saudi Arabia, etc. Now all you can talk about is how Iraq is going to keep us busy for decades, "but it's necessary!!!" Nor is there any hiding the fact that we are weak. What is obvious to us is also obvious to them. Israel pulled out of Gaza and still remains under attack. Most of our coalition partners have left and very few new partners have shown up to take the load. You want statistics on that? Here it is: Coalition KIA statistics by country in Iraq Year US UK Other 2003 486 53 40 (10 months) 2004 848 22 35 (12 months) 2005 698 27 27 (10 months) icasualties.org In 2003, other countries took 16% of the fatalities. In 2005, it's down to 7% and a good bit of that was from two incidents in January. For February-October of 2005, coalition KIA other than US were down to 5.4% of the total. In only two years, our initial (paltry) foreign support in Iraq of 16% has now dropped to around half. Who will be sending troops to Iraq 10 years from now? Meanwhile, support for Iraqi insurgents from foreign countries continues to rise as you yourself repeatedly state. US public support for the war continues to drop. Who is weakening and who is strengthening? Guys killed in hopeless wars die for nothing. -- Carl