> That would only be the case if I believed in "retaliation" like you. I am
opposed to killing
> innocent people and I don't care if it's "retaliation" for past
injustices. 9-11 was immoral because
> it killed large numbers of innocent people and because it was a gift to
apologists for imperialism
> like you.
No -- 9/11 was a deliberate attack on civilians (not all of whom were white or American) by Islamic fascists who believe in jihad. This same gang has also killed Africans, Indians and other Arabs who were seen as mere tissue in the way of the Glorious Wahabbi cause. They subjected Afghans to the cruelest of tortures, under the aegis of their Pakistani sponsors. Yet to respond to them with force after they kill thousands in what Chomsky termed the greatest instant mass murder in history is a "racist double standard"? Nice try, but save this hollow rhetoric for your living room chats.
> >The intervention staved off a famine. Had the Taliban been in
> > power over the winter, countless more lives would have been lost to
> > starvation than have been to US bombs.
>
> False. You need to stop watching CNN. Had the US never threatened to
attack Afghanistan the borders
> would not have been closed and the bombs not disrupted food supplies. It
was the US intervention
> which brought this situation about. Once the Taliban fell the situation
improved considerably. Had
> US attacks not brought down the Taliban so quickly a worse famine would
have come about due to the
> continued war.
Wrong. A three-year drought combined with Taliban misrule and tyranny led to the near-starvation of Afghans. But I like how you back-handedly acknowledge that the intervention staved off this famine while posturing as a brave anti-imperialist. You must be a limber guy.
> I read Rashid's book in February. Saudi Arabia is also a staging area for
terror, they fund Whabbi
> terrorists and most of the highjackers were saudis.
Really? Then you must have forgotten this passage (from page 140):
"The Arab-Afghans had come full circle. From being mere appendages to the Afghan jihad and the Cold War in the 1980s they had taken centre stage for the Afghans, neighbouring countries and the West in the 1990s. The USA was now paying the price for ignoring Afghanistan between 1992 and 1996, while the Taliban were providing sanctuary to the most hostile and militant Islamic fundamentalist movement the world faced in the post-Cold War era. Afghanistan was now truly a haven for Islamic internationalism and terrorism and the Americans and the West were at a loss as to handle it."
> This isn't history, the US continues to butcher people today. The
sanctions and bombings of Iraq,
> sponsoring mass murder in Turkey against the Kurds, support for Israeli
ethnic cleansing, sponsoring
> a coup in Venezuala, funding the IMF (which causes mass starvation and
death by "structural
> adjustment"), Plan Colombia and death squad training are some examples.
I'm aware of all this. And by 1941, when the US entered the war against Germany, Italy and Japan, the US had killed millions of native Americans and African slaves, extended its imperial reach to the Phillipines, Cuba and most of Central and South America (including a Marine invasion and occupation of Nicaragua in the 1920s), allowed Jim Crow to flourish in the South and battled European fascism and Japanese imperialism with a segregated military. By your standard the engagement of the Nazis was yet another imperial chapter. And I'm sure had you been around then, you would have opposed World War II as an imperialist land grab.
DP