<BR><BR><B><I>Jim Devine <jdevine03@gmail.com></I></B> wrote: <BLOCKQUOTE class=replbq style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #1010ff 2px solid"> <div>Chris Doss wrote: > >For the record, I was against the whole thing at<BR><BR>huh? what about the attacks in Spain and London? In any event, al<BR>Qaeda always waited a couple of years between attacks, perhaps because<BR>their efforts were so labor-intensive and they didn't have many<BR>people. A bit after the first attack on the World Trade Center in<BR>1993, you might have said that _Clinton's_ anti-al Qaeda policy was<BR>really, really successful.<BR><BR>Also, I'd think that we could learn not to use Hitler analogies. The<BR>Taliban was horrible, yes, but was it Nazi? Was is worse even than the<BR>US allies, the Northern Alliance of warlords? Was the Taliban worse<BR>than the US military machine?<BR><BR>My objections against the Bush invasion of Afghanistan haven't<BR>changed. In it, the US acted as
detective, prosecutor, judge, jury,<BR>and executioner rolled up all in one. It was attacking forces (the<BR>Taliban, al Qaeda) that were largely or partly of its own creation,<BR>without learning any lessons about how to avoid similar mistakes in<BR>the future. Once the invasion had been pulled off, the US largely<BR>pulled out, leaving the mop-up to NATO and repeating (on a smaller<BR>scale) US policy after the end of Soviet occupation, i.e., "liberate"<BR>the country by destroying it and then abandon it. It abandoned it<BR>because the successful invasion had reinforced the Bushmasters'<BR>hubris, encouraging them to invade Iraq (which had been the main<BR>target all along).<BR>--<BR>Jim Devine / Bust Big Brother Bush!<BR>"Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their<BR>common sense." -- Gertrude Stein<BR><BR>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.</div> <div> </div> <div>It wasn't the Taliban that was the threat as much as al-Quada which the Taliban were harboring.</div> <div> </div> <div>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.</div> <div> </div> <div>Again, I say this as someone who opposed the war at the time and has come to believe he was wrong. </div></BLOCKQUOTE><p>
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