>My point was not that this is the same situation as 1941 (or even 1939), but
>that an imperial US state can pick the right fight, even for selfish
>reasons. I was responding to Yoshie's suggestion that nothing the US state
>does is good or can be good, therefore it is "fantasy" to try to appeal to
>it, reform it or change it.
well one can isolate it like that out of context. to evaluate whether this is the "right fight" or not one needs to go all the way back origion of the conflict or threat and that was the soviet afghan war in which the U.S. funded and trained most of what makes up the taliban and al qaeda not to defend afghanistan against soviet invasion but to provoke a soviet invasion, "to give them their vietnam" (to quote Z. Brzyzinski i think) so given that context you think the U.S. is uniquely qualified to deal with the problem they essentially created in the first place unilaterally? and so far the "war solution" has only reinstalled the Northern alliance warlords that by all accounts of people that had to live under it were worse than the Taliban and the only positive effect has been that the mass starvation that the war exacerbated has been averted? i hope ofcourse that the NA warlord regime once "focus' on afghanistan has died down doesn't revert to the way it was when they were in charge before, that is raping, pillaging and public executions in soccer stadiums....(obviously the Taliban did not invent their methods of brutality) but i'm very skeptical.
>No, al-Qaeda is not Nazi Germany, but it's not Al Capone either, as someone
>else suggested. It is backed by the Saudis and parts of the Pakistani ISI
>and operates in different countries. Different, yes, but still dangerous,
>and worth fighting.
the saudis are merely a front for U.S. support and i imagine pakistan is as well so after washington takes out pakistan, Saudi Arabia it should then attack itself? well now we are back to square one sort of......
~M.E.