>
>It's not so very difficult to understand: this is the parallel that Chomsky
>himself drew,
But it's one analogy, whether or not it's fortunate. It'sn not like Chomsky hasn't been making this point about US foreign policy for almsot 35 years.
and I believe he did so to insinuate that even a limited
>employment of force by the US to weaken bin Laden would (as in Sudan) cause
>more damage in the future than it could possibly prevent.
I don't think that was the point. The piunt was just what I said, that US intervention regularly involves horrors as bad, if not necessarily as spectacular, as 9/11.
>
>Frankly, I'm a bit more puzzled by the inability of others to recognize
>that
>not all interventions are equally horrible.
Everyone agrees with with this. The Vietnam war was far worse than, say, the bombing of Serbia, in terms of deaths, effect on the afflicted society, and so forth. The Soviet and US involvement in Afghanistan was probably in between, though pretty terrible.
Special forces operations to
>destroy bin Laden's networks may be ultimately counterproductive (although
>that's far from certain), but they're unlikely to inflict many civilian
>casualties.
You'd think we would have learned, but no. Sure, if the special forces just poke around in the mountains and we avoid bombing villages, it won't be so bad in terms of "collateral damage," but it's far from clear that they will be able to capture or kill bin Laden, and the record of the long term effecdts of US involvement has not been good. Aftera ll, as been pointed out at length all over the place, bin Laden himself is a prodyct of past US involvement in Afghanistan.
Even an effort to oust the Taliban needn't be a war against the
>people of Afghanistan, for they and not the US are the party that has
>incurred the most suffering at the hands of that wretched regime.
The Tabilan is a vile regime, and deserves to be overthrown by the Afghan people. But the US has not got a good track record when it comes to overthrowing other countries' governments and replacing them with something better. The Taliban is a case in point.
On the
>other hand, we ought to worry about the prospect of a war against multiple
>states akin to the one Wolfowitz and others have called for.
Yea, indeed.
>
>A query for those who advocate bringing bin Laden and co to trial (as I
>would if I thought it possible): who's going to bring him into the UN's
>custody? Do you think that he'll willingly turn himself in?
Not likely. Of course if we hadn't been such jerks about it, and had presented the evidence to the Taliban, it's not beyond conception that they might have turned him over to the International Tribunal. Be that as it may. If the US is going to comb the mountains to find him, it still ought to be with a law enforcement and not a military goal: the point should be to bring a suspect to justice, not to kill an enemy when we don't even know for sure that he is the enemy.
jks
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