>The widespread application of military force
>and the failure to grant any concessions on
>support for Israel, propping up the Saudi
>regime, etc. will fail to prevent further
>terrorism. Thus if there are no major,
>further acts of terrorism after the exercise
>of U.S. military force for a sufficient period
>(three months? next spring?), then you are wrong,
>I am right, and your notion of my 'wild
>utopianism' will require radical revision.
Oh, come on - what are the odds for any given three month or even six month period over the 25 years preceeding the 9/11 attacks that there was a "major terrorist attack" on a western nation? This is a silly wager, but given the current anthrax scare, I'll bet you a string of Maldivan cowries.
If you are serious about treating the intervention as a "historical experiment" - ok, let's do that. But lets get the proper statistical data. I think that what we will find is that terrorist attacks against western targets are sporadic and clustered around precipitating factors, and you have to take a decade as a unit to get meaningful stats. With such a framework, I accept your wager.
Also, as far as a cost benefit analysis goes, we have to be honest and say that 2-4 million starving Afghans is too high a price to pay for, say , an average yearly death toll of about 1000 or even 10,000 Americans every year over the next ten years - assuming Al Qaeda could sustain that, or would want to in the long run, supposing minimal consessions were made. There is a proper moral equivalence between their deaths and ours: they are both completely unnacceptable.
Of course, 2-4 million Afghans haven't starved yet - but that is what our actions are threatening. What bin-Laden's actions are threatening, in the worst, most paranoid right wing scenario, is a nuclear bomb in LA or NY, with maybe a million deaths. But the odds on that are simply unknown; the odds of lots of people dying if we pursue this war further are high. Do certainly terrible actions justify averting uncertain and possibly improbable outcomes?
If I was feeling particularly bold, I'd say the US prefers the cold calculation of using violence, terrible as it is and likely to invoke terrible retribution, than the uncertainty of pursuing the novel course of negotiating and compromising. Elites hate uncertainty. They don't usually gamble unless they can stack the odds, or at least know them.
I make a counter bet: that more Afghans will die as a result of American violence than Americans from Afghan-based violence , over the next few years. I'll bet a Maltese falcon on that.
Thiago.