The US _has_ been carpet bombing Afghanistan; I've seen photographs which prove it. Fortunetly, to my knowledge, it's not on the scale of Vietnman but it is still being done. They have also been using cluster bombs & daisy cutters.
>>Notice how similar Osama's rhetoric about "self defense" and
>>"retaliation" is to your own (and even more so Bush's).
>
> I'm simply reacting to a filthy gang of fascist murderers who openly want to
> kill me and mine -- and you too, friend, despite your best efforts to stay
> above the strife.
Replace fascist with crusader and the above would be a paraphrase of Bin Laden's justification for attacking Americans. You have a double standard - for some reason Americans have the right to defend themselves but not Arabs.
> The capitalists started this war? If most of the Middle East was an
> anarcho-socialist utopia, al-Qaeda would still attack, for its bottom line,
> as you acknowledge, is not helping the poor and dispossessed but imprisoning
> them under Sharia Law.
"Anarcho-socialist"?!? That's redunant; your'e sounding more and more reactionary every day. This is obviously a war between two factions of capitalist fundamentalists - one led by Bush, the other by Bin Laden. If the middle east were anarchist Al-Qaeda would never have come into existence in the first place. Why do you think Al-Qaeda is going after America and not Switzerland? Because America has been butchering people in other countries on a scale which dwarfs 9-11.
> Really? You mean it would have been better to allow the Taliban and al-Qaeda
> to continue running Afghanistan?
I think Afghanistan would have been better off had foreign powers never intervened in the first place. The present dictatorship is at best marginally better then the Taliban and most of that improvement is because the US/UK isn't waging war on it's subjects.
>>Al-Qaeda's demands - removal of US troops from the Persian
>>Gulf, an end to US backing of Israel & middle eastern dictatorships -
>>are not unreasonable. I see no reason why peace negotiations couldn't
>>be conducted.
>
> Man, this is truly sad. Hey, the Nazis only wanted they Sudetenland back --
> they were screwed by the Versailles Treaty after all . . .
Faulty analogy. Every enemy of the US gets called hitler & too many leftists call anything they don't like "fascist". It a bunch of nonsense.
> Negotiating the end of the above is admirable and necessary, and should be
> done with those interested in negotiation. Al-Qaeda isn't. It's all or
> nothing with them. They must be wiped out.
Actually, some of Bin Laden's statements imply that he'd be willing to negotiate if he actually thought he could get the US to withdraw from the Persian Gulf with negotiation. He, like you, does not believe his enemy is willing to negotiate and uses very similar rhetoric. He believes that the only way to get Americans to stop killing Muslims is to start killing Americans. If Americans would stop killing Muslims, propping up dictatorships, etc. a peace deal is definately not out of the question. But both sides will have to stop dehumanizing the other.
-- Joe R. Golowka JoeG at ieee.org Anarchist FAQ -- http://www.anarchyfaq.org
"According to the libertarian litany, if an industry or an institution is making a profit, it is satisfying "wants" whose origins and content are deliberately disregarded. But what we want, what we are capable of wanting is relative to the forms of social organization. People "want" fast food because they have to hurry back to work, because processed supermarket food doesn't taste much better anyway, because the nuclear family (for the dwindling minority who have even that to go home to) is too small and too stressed to sustain much festivity in cooking and eating -- and so forth. It is only people who can't get what they want who resign themselves to want more of what they can get. Since we cannot be friends and lovers, we wail for more candy." - Bob Black