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

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (183773)	3/19/2006 12:55:25 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Ideologies are what we war against. Nazism had a blatant goal of conquest. Communism had a blatant goal of global insurgency and conquest. Imperial Japan had a vision of Asian Empire. Islamo-Fascism has a vision of global Jihad that will never end until everyone is Muslim. All of these ideologies, in their fledgling state, are far easier to destroy or neutralize, than they will be after they are permitted to consolidate their gains. I'm not really certain that Osama's vision is to convert everyone to Islam, but let's suppose that it is--Saddam had nothing to do with that. It wasn't his vision. If anything, he was about as opposed to that as any Moslem could be (he had his own delusions of grandeur, IMO). If anything, Saddam was an Arab ally against Osama and his crew. Now, please don't try to twist that into saying that I "support" Saddam. But--facts are facts. When you add the above to the other points you make in your post about stateless actors, then you get better reasons to NOT invade Iraq and depose Saddam than to get rid of him. I don't deny that there are plenty of people who would like to attack the US again, even using WMDs, if they can get ahold of them. I look at the world today and believe that there are a lot more people today who would like to do that--or who would sympathize with this sort of attack--than there were on Sept 12, 2001. If military actions should be judged by whether or not they successfully accomplish political goals, then our military actions have been, so far, a miserable failure.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (183773)	3/19/2006 2:18:37 PM
From: paret	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

When Bill Clinton misled us into an obscure region called Kosovo to stop a genocide that wasn't happening, he told us it would stabilize the region, keep the conflict from spreading. This is precisely what Milosevic was doing. Like clockwork, within months of our intervention, the Albanians moved on to terrorize Macedonia, and now they are fighting for parts of Southern Serbia, Montenegro and Greece--to form the Greater Albania that had been their nationalistic and Islamic vision all along. Meanwhile, as UN human rights observer Jiri Dienstbier has said, "Kosovo is an infinitely more dangerous place than it was before" the U.S.-led NATO intervention. What we managed to do, if you can imagine, was destabilize the notoriously unstable Balkans.