Jim Devine <jdevine03 at gmail.com> wrote: Chris Doss wrote: > >For the record, I was against the whole thing at
huh? what about the attacks in Spain and London? In any event, al Qaeda always waited a couple of years between attacks, perhaps because their efforts were so labor-intensive and they didn't have many people. A bit after the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, you might have said that _Clinton's_ anti-al Qaeda policy was really, really successful.
Also, I'd think that we could learn not to use Hitler analogies. The Taliban was horrible, yes, but was it Nazi? Was is worse even than the US allies, the Northern Alliance of warlords? Was the Taliban worse than the US military machine?
My objections against the Bush invasion of Afghanistan haven't changed. In it, the US acted as detective, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner rolled up all in one. It was attacking forces (the Taliban, al Qaeda) that were largely or partly of its own creation, without learning any lessons about how to avoid similar mistakes in the future. Once the invasion had been pulled off, the US largely pulled out, leaving the mop-up to NATO and repeating (on a smaller scale) US policy after the end of Soviet occupation, i.e., "liberate" the country by destroying it and then abandon it. It abandoned it because the successful invasion had reinforced the Bushmasters' hubris, encouraging them to invade Iraq (which had been the main target all along). -- Jim Devine / Bust Big Brother Bush! "Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense." -- Gertrude Stein
So what was your plan for dealing with al-Queda? They had just murdered 3, 000 people, were using Afghanistan as a base to plan more attacks, including nuclear and biological attacks. By invading the country, the U.S. destroyed this base and, in my view, forestalled further attacks, at least for a while.
It wasn't the Taliban that was the threat as much as al-Quada which the Taliban were harboring.
As for Spain and London, they were done by groups inspired by al-Quada, not al-Quada itself. This is particulary true of the London attack, which appears to have been carried out by a bunch of teenagers with no foreign involvement at all. And Spain and London were small potatoes compared to the kinds of attacks al-Quada would have been able to carry out had its base in Afghanistan not been destroyed.
Again, I say this as someone who opposed the war at the time and has come to believe he was wrong.
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