fine. For those of you too dense to recognize the subtle sarcasm of that post, I'll make it elementary school simple for you:
"What does our current occupation of Iraq have to do with preventing al Qaeda from carrying out terrorist activities against the U.S. and western Europe?
Well, for one, we know that Zarqawi and his band of several thousand 72-virgin-laden al Qaedan followers aren't plotting a terrorist act in the U.S.
We also know that Saddam Hussein isn't still sending $25,000 dollar checks to terrorists and their families, or giving them Baghdad room and board, or giving them god knows what else he planned to give them.
...or from Iraq. They're plotting from Afganistan and Pakistan, same place they've been in since September 11, 2001. Again, not Iraq. (consult a map). And now we have to deal with "non-regulars" who organize on their own from the UK and Canada and Chicago...which (consulting map) is in the U.S. I'd love to hear your suggestion for military deployment to stop these guys too.
I see. We spend over $300 Billion, sacrifice the lives of 2591 soldiers and hamstring our military capability so Hussein will no longer have the ability to dole out 25k checks to Palestinian suicide bomber families. Bin Laden and al Qaeda were never "best buddies" with Saddam Hussein. They considered Hussein a secular apostate.
And Malaysia and Indonesia and Northern Africa etc...all place we're battling them.
I see. Where was Abu Nidal in retirement? And Salmon Pak?
There isn't a military solution to those within the United States except by attacking their sources of financial and ideologic support abroad. Which is what we're doing in approximately 2 dozen countries worldwide, including Iraq.
And al Qaeda would never team with Hizbollah...oops.
Al Qaeda was being trained at Salman Pak. Maybe it's good to have a couple hundred thousand troops next door to Syria, Iran, and Israel right now.
Really? We have troops in Malaysia, Indonesia, Lybia, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Morocco hunting down terrorist? Oh, yeah...we DON'T.
Granted we do have a few troops in Afganistan (a known al Qaeda hangout, don't-cha-know!). We probably should have more, but...we're a little "tied up" in Iraq.
Hey! You know another well known al Qaeda hangout? Pakistan! But we don't have any troops over there. Hey, aren't they supposed to be our ally?
Yay! We got their retirement home! Floridians everywhere thank their lucky stars they didn't choose Boca Raton.
Remember that long list of Islamic countries we don't have troops in listed abo ve? Exactly how does our military force attack their finances from their ever more permanent bases in Iraq? For that matter, how is the military supposed to attack their ideological support? Blow up their mosques? Yeah! That'll learn 'im!
You should've stopped 5 words in..."There isn't a military solution"
Yeah, everyone at the Pentagon not named Donald Rumsfeld thinks it's just GREAT that the bulk of military is tied up in Iraq refereeing a civil war...oops! (I forgot, it's not a civil war unless blue and grey uni's, single shot rifles, and Ken Burns are involved) err...sectarian violence, insurgency and plain ol' crime, while surrounded by Iran and Syria.
All those lefty, cut-n-run General and military strategists at the Pentagon. Shame on them!
Not to worry though. If Iran or Syria try anything funny and the Middle East explodes into all-out-war, we can always just say "To with it!" and nuke the out Iran, Iraq, Syria, Afganistan...pretty much any and every country that had any ties to terrorism (Saudi Arabia, anyone?). And that will once and for all end the war on terror, because there's no chance the wholesale destruction of someone's homeland could inspire any further acts of terrorism, right?
Last edited by PixelPusher; 08-10-2006 at 11:13 PM.
Actually, we've had some hunter-killer Special Forces units working in Africa since about November of '01.Really? We have troops in Malaysia, Indonesia, Lybia, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Morocco hunting down terrorist? Oh, yeah...we DON'T.
So a few special forces is sufficient for all of North Africa but Iraq requires hundreds of thousand of ground troops and permanent bases?
Last edited by PixelPusher; 08-10-2006 at 11:39 PM.
if we're going by alqueda numebers, why not?
All liquids temporarily bound on flights in the united states.
The chaos begins.
That how the many of the Palestinians think about the Israels. They will kill them even if kills themselves.
It's worse, even. Imagine if the U.N. decided that American Indians needed their own homeland separate from the U.S.A., and declared that a piece of South Texas would be par ioned out to make this new country, and that any non-native-tribe-Americans living in this section would be forced to move out, at gunpoint if necessary.
I have a hunch that Americans, and Texans in particular, would not take this lying down, would reject the legitimacy of the new country, and would pick up arms to destroy it.
Fast forward 60 years. Texans have been fighting continuously to destroy the new country, but all the other major powers in the world have given billions upon billions of dollars to help the Indian state to defend itself from attack. As a result, the American section of South Texas is devastated. In fact, the Indians through the fighting have expanded their territory to include half of San Antonio. For a time, they erected settlements in the Hill Country, as Indian religious extremists pushed an agenda to annex those lands to their territory, though that plan recently has fallen increasingly in disrepute.
How would you as a Texan feel about all this? Would you say:
A) The Indians have a birthright to the land, and we have 49 other states and the entire northern two-thirds of Texas to live in, so we should just lay down arms and accept it.
B) We should aspire to live in peace, so let's negotiate a settlement where the Indians keep the land they live in now, and San Antonio is made an "international city."
C) F*** the Indians, kill them all, and f*** these world powers that aid them, this is our land and we will never, ever give it up even if it means we have to die for it.
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The Western powers, in our infinite wisdom, have created an impossible situation. 60 years in, you can't just say "Never mind, let's nullify the creation of Israel." It's done. There are 6 million people who live there, and who would be subject to slaughter and oppression were they to remain there under Arab rule. (Yes, they would. Even under the best cir stances, dhimmi Jews live like Jim Crow blacks. What was "tolerant" in 1400 is "apartheid" today.) They aren't going to leave voluntary, as they claim Israel as their ancient homeland and have lived there for three generations.
But neither are the Arabs, or other Muslims, going to accept its existence.
So... we get war until one side loses.
Good analogy.... seriously.
The only thing you left out, would be the little part where war was bound to happen anyways, because prophetically speaking, the return of Israel was foretold. Did we make it happen? or was the creation of Israel to occur despite our meddling?
I'm amillenialist.
Analogy flawed.
Amillenial Preterist, present.I'm amillenialist.
OK, I'll modify the analogy. This time, we'll have the U.N. declare the Navajo reservation an independent country.
The Navajos already own it. They already live on it. It is their ancestral land (or part of it). We've controlled the area for 158 years. They have been there for at least a couple thousand years. Would we accept that?
Or would we see it as an attack upon the territorial integrity of our nation?
I don't think the fact that the Arabs were not self-governing during the period of the Par ion (or at any time since the rise of the Ottomans) abrogates their nationalist sentiments. Before we were much involved in the region, they loathed the British.
And you are not correct in the assertion that the Jews were given only lands they already had purchased. They had scattered settlements in the Galilee, between Haifa and Beersheba, and a few around Jerusalem. They owned, at most, 20% of the land that made up the Jewish par ion in the 1947 plan.
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I did some more interesting reading about the creation of Israel which would supercede my assertion that "we" the Western powers screwed up, and which gives some insight into the at udes of the non-Arab Muslim world concerning the Jews. Following WWII, as the "Jewish question" came to the forefront, there was more than one solution proposed.
The U.N. commissioned a team of nations to study the various options regarding whether to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, or an autonomous region, or to put them somewhere else, or to do nothing. To lessen the amount of strongarming, all major powers were left off the team.
When the report came back, seven nations recommended creating a par ion of two states west of the Jordan River, one Muslim, one Jewish. Three nations, one of which was Iran, recommended two autonomous regions, one Muslim, one Jewish, within a single central government located in an internationally-administrated Jerusalem, and one nation (Australia) abstained from making a recommendation.
Churchill actually was trying to scuttle any attempt to create a Jewish state during this time, since he was afraid an Arab backlash would endanger British oil interests. The UK actually abstained from voting on the par ion plan.
So, at the time, one could argue that the government in Iran was more sympathetic to the Jewish issue than the British government was. Of course, in 1953, that government was overthrown in favor of the Shah, again, to protect British oil interests.
Aside -- Churchill was a heck of a leader during wartime, but in peace, he was a disastrous bloody little bas .
NY Times(snip)
“In retrospect,’’ said Michael A. Sheehan, the former deputy commissioner of counterterrorism in the New York Police Department, “there may have been too much hyperventilating going on.”
(snip)
Duh!
Some more excerpts from the article...
...But at the same time, five senior British officials said, the suspects were not prepared to strike immediately. Instead, the reactions of Britain and the United States in the wake of the arrests of 21 people on Aug. 10 were driven less by information about a specific, imminent attack than fear that other, unknown terrorists might strike.
...
Despite the charges, officials said they were still unsure of one critical question: whether any of the suspects was technically capable of assembling and detonating liquid explosives while airborne.
A chemist involved in that part of the inquiry, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was sworn to confidentiality, said HMTD, which can be prepared by combining hydrogen peroxide with other chemicals, “in theory is dangerous,” but whether the suspects “had the brights to pull it off remains to be seen.”
...
Two of the men, who were likely the bomb-makers, were conducting a series of experiments with chemicals, said the person briefed on the case.
MI5 agents secretly installed video and audio recording equipment inside the apartment, two senior British officials said. In a secret search conducted before the Aug. 10 raids, agents had discovered that the inside of batteries had been scooped out, and that it appeared several suspects were doing chemical experiments with a sports drink named Lucozade and syringes, the person with knowledge of the case said. Investigators have said they believe that the suspects intended to bring explosive chemicals aboard planes inside sports drink bottles.
...
“The plotters received a very short message to ‘Go now,’ ” said Franco Frattini, the European Union’s security commissioner, who was briefed by the British home secretary, John Reid, in London. “I was convinced by British authorities that this message exists.”
A senior British official said the message from Pakistan was not that explicit. But, nonetheless, investigators here had to change their strategy quickly.
“The aim was to keep this operation going for much longer,” said a senior British security official who requested anonymity because of confidentiality rules. “It ended much sooner than we had hoped.”
From then on, the British government was driven by worst-case scenarios based on a minimum-risk strategy. ...
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