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Originally Posted by aklim
No it has not. Glaring example is Tora Bora. Explain to me why it is a good thing to not level it and get rid of OBL there? What did we do? Send a bunch of men in and not even our men. Great. Just great. If we had nuked it, it would have shown we were serious. Unfortuntely, the greatest enemy is not OBL but ourselves. We don't dare do what is necessary.
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Nuking Tora Bora would have definitely killed OBL. But it wouldn't win the war on terror. OBL does not equal militant Islam. He is just the current poster boy for it. Killing him isn't going to stop this, and a thousand OBLs would rise from the ashes of that firestorm. We aren't fighting a man or a country, we're fighting a belief system.
Employing nuclear weapons would only serve to justify/reinforce the things that OBL preaches to his followers, namely that the US is a decadent, selfish and immoral country bent on world hegemony. It would be playing into his rhetoric. It would widen his support base all over the world, including inside the US. That would mean more money, more support, more people willing to die for the ideal that OBL represents. It would weaken or entirely remove the resolve of allied nations to partner with the US in this battle. This would be something of a phyrric (sp?) victory.