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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (12205)	2/15/2006 10:55:39 PM
From: KonKilo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 540884

...I don't find it {fight them there so we don't have to fight them here} morally bankrupt or intellectually dishonest ... My words... Morally bankrupt because this notion seems to indicate that we made the conscious decision to allow other innocent citizens to become "collateral damage" in a long shot attempt to spare our own citizens a similar fate. Try as I might, even imaging my own loved ones as terror casualties, I cannot find the moral high ground in this viewpoint. Intellectually dishonest because it certainly would be no problem for Al Queda to spare another nineteen jihadis with box cutters. We certainly don't believe that we have them all pinned down in Iraq do we?

To: TimF who wrote (12205)	2/16/2006 8:34:42 AM
From: thames_sider	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 540884

They could contribute to the defeat or at least the marginalization of Al Qaeda indirectly and in the long term by "drying up the swamp", but we won't really know how well that works for at least years probably decades. Leaving aside that conflict in Iraq lasting decades would be more likely to dry up our forces than Al Qaeda's, you're basing this entire argument on the flawed premise that terrorist forces are fixed and do not change in response to our involvement. They're not. It's brutally plain that our invasion of Iraq has stirred up the ME very strongly against the US and the west. We have tipped mild dislike into strong dislike, strong dislike into hatred: simple complaint into vocal opposition, and vocal opponents into supporters if not abettors of terrorism. NOt even limited to Iraq, either, but across the ME. As I almost tire of saying, this is to be expected if you occupy a country: the IRA didn't tire of terrorism after 20 years, and their grievances were far less raw and provoked than the Iraqis... Even the much-maligned French were not exactly curbed by the Nazis when they were occupied, they managed to resist quite successfully for 4 years, and they weren't surrounded by sympathetic peoples. And each reported episode of brutality, callousness, corruption or simple disregard for 'collateral damage' (i.e. killing civilians and destroying their houses and lives) makes it worse for us. IOW, we are breeding far more potential and actual terrorists by this action (as many of us predicted before the invasion). We will not 'dry out the swamp' by running tanks all over it and bombing the levees, and there may not even have been a swamp there before but there's certainly a sucking quagmire now!