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

To: Lane3 who wrote (85065)	9/17/2008 7:28:43 PM
From: Cogito	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541658

>>That was a charming response, but it ducked the question. Whether it's a matter of "fighting" them here or there or "dealing with them" here or there, they are going to be someplace doing their thing. To the extent that we can limit their choice of places, it makes sense to me to do that. As far as where to confine their activity if we can, I don't think the NIMBY approach is inappropriate.<< Karen - Thanks. But appropriateness has nothing to do with it. The sticking point, which I don't seem to be able to convince you is real, is that the approach simply doesn't work. We can't "limit their choice of places" by putting troops anywhere. Let me try to spell out my argument better. 1 - The fact that troops are in one place obviously doesn't stop Al Qaeda or anyone else from operating in some other place. I'm sure we can agree on that, and today's bombing of the US Embassy in Yemen is a good example, tragically. 2 - When we put troops in Iraq, overthrew their government, and did not secure the entire nation (which would have been impossible, most likely), we created a situation wherein a lot of non-Iraqis entered the country and started attacking our troops using, mostly, IEDs. By the way, using IEDs to attack troop convoys and the like is a terroristic tactic, but it is not Al Qaeda's style. Al Qaeda is given to infrequent but large and spectacular attacks. This loosely knit group of foreigners began calling themselves Al Qaeda in Iraq, but all indications are that they were and are (what's left of them) pretty much independent from the AQ leadership. They didn't like what our troops were doing in Iraq, and they saw an opportunity to attack those troops. We gave them that opportunity. So instead of limiting their choice of locations in which to attack us, we just gave them a new one. But those same people who formed AQ in Iraq could have, if they had wanted to, worked on finding a way into the United States in order to attack us here. Or they could have targeted US civilians elsewhere. Nobody was forcing them to attack US troops instead of US civilians. It was just more convenient for them. To sum up, whether you call it "fighting" or "dealing with" them, we really don't have a choice of locations. Some of us may think we do, but that doesn't make it so. - Allen