andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > I was responding to what I took to be a general
> > claim on your part, i.e. that we should gauge the
> > severity of a threat based upon actual consequences
> > in the past as opposed to "what might have happened
> > but didn't." In probably a majority of cases that's
> > an excellent rule of thumb, but in a non-trivial
> > minority it's clearly ludicrous.
>
> You haven't even tried to show that this is one of
> these. But suppose that al Q had killed 50,000 people
> on Sept 11.
Kennedy, Johnson, & Nixon killed about 55,000 Americans, and ruined the lives of one or two hundred thousasnd more (not to speak of the one to three million Vietnamese they killed) [I suppose we should throw in Truman & Eisenhower here]. Perhaps we should bomb the hell out of Kansas, Missouri, Massachusetts, Texas, & California.
Carrol
> Why does thats how that it would be
> efficious or wise, given the other costs in tersm of
> freedom and money, to go to war with -- whom, Iraq? --
> to combat this menace? The embedded question shows
> that war is, as usual, not thea nswer. Here we don't
> even have a real target.
>
> jks