The U.S. has killed a whole lot more in Iraq. It has used Iraq as a base for bullying Syria and Iran, among others. The fact that it has largely failed in such bullying represents its leaderhship's incompetence more than its benevolence.
I am not convinced by the evidence that al Qaeda was planning nuclear or biological attacks. Most if not all of what I've read on his have been either US propaganda or US "worst case scenarios." (These two types of quasi-information feed on each other and reinforce each other in the neo-con imagination.)
Did (do) I have a plan to deal with Taliban and al Qaeda? No, but I'm not the leader of the state that helped create both of them. So I don't have to think up a solution. (But see the "solution" proposed in the e-mail by Dwayne Moore. Much or most of it makes sense.)
More importantly, if a solution to a problem like the Taliban is imposed from the outside using military force, the solution will always be inferior to one that is imposed by the invaded (Afghan) people themselves. The current "solution" seems to have sparked a revival of the Taliban.
The US has been a bigger threat in many ways than the Taliban. It overthrew a democratically-elected government in Haiti and has tried to do the same in Venezuela. It bombs civilian targets in the Sudan and elsewhere. So-called precision bombing is a lie. It imposed mass death on Iraq both before and after Bushie's splendid little war. Does this justify a Mexican invasion of the US?
>It wasn't the Taliban that was the threat as much as al-Quada which
the Taliban were harboring. <
right. But that doesn't say that the Taliban needed to be ousted. Instead, their attitude could have been adjusted, as it were. The Taliban _did_ offer to give the US Osama, after all.
>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.... <
we don't know what al Qaeda "would have been able to carry out" except in the imaginary world of counterfactuals. (Of course, that world can be fun, perhaps as with the new flick "CSA." But it's not a logical/empirical argument for anything.)
what is "al Qaeda," anyway? is it just Osama and his boys? or is it an informal network? or is it people inspired by Osama and his boys? It really doesn't matter. The Spanish and London bombings were partly in response to Osama's leadership (as it were) and partly in response to the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. They were part of "jihadism," a social movement in the Middle East and among Islamic ex-pats. Al Qaeda is simply an organizational reflection of that movement.
>Again, I say this as someone who opposed the war at the time and has
come to believe he was wrong.<
you don't need to be defensive. I try to never interpret disagreement with my positions personally. I would never attach nasty epithets to you for disagreeing, you petty-bourgeois and snarky slime-ball! ;-) -- Jim Devine / Bust Big Brother Bush! "Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense." -- Gertrude Stein