Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (178654)	1/3/2006 10:42:17 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Hawkmoon; Re: "THEY [terrorists] don't believe they are criminals." Uh, a good half the people in jail don't think they're criminals, LOL. Just because someone thinks they're a duck doesn't mean they're a duck. It's not like Al Qaeda is the first terrorist to attack the west. Terrorism in the West has been going on for long before the founding of Israel and has always been fought by police forces. For fighting terrorists outside the US, the tool is the CIA, not the military. Even people in this administration are having their doubts about Iraq. Re: "They can't be criminals if they never have a cognizance that the laws being enforced by police pertain to them." BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! LOL!!! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Re: "The police are ILL-EQUIPPED to deal with uncovering and terminating an active, well-established terrorist cell network." Hey, police work is not easy. But if the police are ILL-EQUIPPED, the military is NOT-EQUIPPED. Iraq has been turned into a terrorist training ground. Simple fact. Re: "It requires military interaction to take down that network." This has been true only when other countries harbor terrorists, but this is not a charge that has successfully been applied to Saddam. The simple truth is that Al Qaeda thought that Saddam was an infidel and were working to remove him from office. Re: "What you are trying to do here is effectively IGNORE the fact that the terrorists are at war with us and will do ANYTHING they need to do to wage that war, including sacrificing their lives for their cause." I'm not ignoring it, I'm simply putting it into perspective. We lost a lot of people in the WTC, but as you yourself admit, that can't happen again not because of anything the US military has done, but instead because of the natural change in attitude of the US civilian population. What Bush has done is lose more people in Iraq than we lost at the WTC, and the overall effect appears to be that terrorism is healthier now than it ever was before (if one measures terrorism's health by, for example, the total number of suicide bombings in the world). Our allies, who are closer to the source of the terrorists, have been hit hard at home and it is only a matter of time before we're hit again as well. Re: "Criminals, on the other hand, will do anything they can get away with, so long as it doesn't cost them their lives while doing it (doing prison time is just the risk of their line of work.. but they don't want to die)." I haven't seen Osama bin Laden do anything that cost him his life yet, so I think your theory is a bit off. Re: "Do you think 11 million people would have decided to exercise their right to vote in Iraq were it left merely to the Iraqi police to wage the counter-terrorist battle here?" At a very deep and fundamental level, I don't see any particular advantage to the US to have democracy in Iraq. There's nothing magical about democracy. Hitler was elected to power and the German people loved him and his policies dearly. Iraq itself was never much of a threat to the US. My suspicion is that the underlying reason for the invasion was to reduce the threat to Israel, not the US. And Israel's actions since the invasion show every evidence of a country that is trying to make an independent peace with the locals before the guerilla warriors we're training in Iraq show up on their borders. The last Iraqi poll I saw showed that the public there was united in few things, but that one of the big ones was support for Saddam's attacks against Israel. I doubt that this will change after we leave. But it is an historical fact that nascent democracies, when faced with problems at home, tend to have leaders that unite their people by fighting a common enemy. Fortunately for us, Israel is more convenient for that than we are. Carl