Oh no. We entered with the gift of "democracy".

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Russians entered Afghanistan at the request of the govt for help too. What of it? You really believe everything like that is said because somebody believes in it? It just means they are a problem and this is a cover story. Nothing new. Move on.

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This seems to indicate otherwise with regard to your claim that Bush linked 9/11 to Saddam Hussein's Iraq...

You'll notice that I quoted the entire sentence without editing. There was no editing of your previous comments either. I quoted them in full.



I came very close to including that BBC article in my previous post. It says nothing other than Iraq, and other terrorist sponsors besides Al Qaida, are a threat to this country and the western way of life.

In light of the translated documents released a year or so ago that links Al Qaida with Iraq in Indonesia, along with President Clinton's concern over WMDs in Iraq and the Clinton, Bush I and Bush II administrations concern over links between Al Qaida and Iraq plus the attempt to purchase uranium from Niger I cannot conclude that Iraq meant anything towards the US other than harm. This, among other reasons, plus the state sponsored terrorism in which Saddam's Iraq paricipated showed that it was a clear threat. Not to mention a strategically important piece of geopgraphy as well no doubt see shortly after Kofi Annan returns from Iran proclaiming "...peace in our time".

I find it interesting that the title of this thread is "how do we win a war on 'terror'?". So far, we've gotten responses that the United States is responsible for all the events currently taking place - not a response to the original question and untrue as well.

The second round of responses blames the entire thing on the the Bush administration. This illustrates the dangers inherent in what I'll continue to refer to as BDS, or Bush Derangement Syndrome, for lack of a better term. Although it is very descriptive. Rather than focus on the folks we all agree want to kill us, the emphasis is on Bush. Bush is the first American president that acknowledged there was indeed a conflict between radical Islam and the Western way of life. Previous administrations ignored the issue which directly resulted in 9/11. Bush had no choice but to acknowledge the reality of the situation post 9/11. Yet rather than acknowledge the threat that exists to this country and others who are part of the free world, many choose to ridicule and forcefully ignore the writing on the wall. Still no response to the original question.

Fortuitously, the original question was restated in a negative. This allows for a somewhat easier dissection of the issue. The answers to that question are much more simple, accurate and to the point. Thanks, Bot.

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

I don't know what that sentence means.You didn't quote them at all, unless you are talking about some other post. I said:You paraphrased me as follows:Those two quotes speak for themselves. Was there some other post where you "quoted the entire sentence without editing"?It also quotes Bush using 9/11 as a justification for invading Iraq.I'm sure Saddam would have gladly nuked us. He just didn't have the capacity. I agreed with those who said before the invasion that he was not a threat. I was right. (Imagine that.)Geography is one of the main reasons the invasion was a bad idea. We removed Iran's natural enemy.I will have to go back and read the responses. I don't remember any that said that the US is responsible for all the events.Well, I apologize if I had a part in hijacking your thread.

One thing we could do to win the war on terror would be to focus our efforts on the people who threaten us, not on countries that don't threaten us.

There will always be some terrorism as a means of evoking change, there always has been. The current philosophical mindset of being in a "war" has more to do with there being a spectacular attack on our own soil.

When homegrown terrorist like McVie or the Unabomber did their work, was a "war" declared? If so, I missed it. Even when the initial attempt on bombing the World Trade Center occured, was there a war . . . or a criminal investigation?

We have a "war" because there needed to be that visceral response to the attacks.

So my asking you a question in my own words is incorrectly paraphrasing you???

You meant to imply, in fact you stated it, that Bush had linked Saddam's Iraq directly to the 9/11 attacks. He never did.

Clinton's administration felt the same way about many things regarding Al Qaida as you do about Iraq. Both of you are/were wrong.

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

The difference between Mcveigh and "the war" is that Mcveigh was a member of a small minority group that used terrorism to prove a point. As you pointed out, every country has this to some extent or the other. Basques in Spain, Tamil's in Sri Lanka. Ours are fortunatly small in number and have been largely defanged after Oklahoma.

The current struggle is differentiated by numerous groups, worldwide, that share the same ideology and have made numerous attacks in a multitude of countries. They have an international network, financial and otherwise (less so financial than 5 years ago). They had large support in the past from sovereign nations including Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Pakistan. Currently only the goverments of Iran and Syria are the main state sponsors of terrorism. Radical Islam is the key similarity between all groups. Radical Islam has an end goal of destroying any conflicting philosophy whether it be religous or secular. Anything that is not Islam.

We have a war because there is a large concerted force, worth paying attention to, that has declared war on us; about 20 years ago.

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

So, when the CIA was "sponsoring" via intel, cash, training and "advisors" to the rebel squads in Central and South America . . . we weren't a state sponsoring terrorism?

Exactimo. Like Lao Tzu said, "the more you stir the water, the dirtier it gets."

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1. Good example of your black and white view. You assert that I say it was our fault. Rather, I'm saying that we had a part in the tone of things getting to the present, less than optimal state. We cannot only behave as thought the other side is evil, evil to the core and that explains everything.

2. As long as we're there, fools are going to be slitting the throats of people who cooperate with the Americans. It will not stablilize while we're there. Oh maybe that's the idea: permanent occupation.

3. More like Islamic nationalism. The fascist label is moronic.

4. You got a blueprint for a UN like organization that would work any better?

5. Instead, lets act like we're the ones who are needed to straighten things out and like our notion of the best path forward is unfailingly accurate.

It is and we made it that way.

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Te futueo et caballum tuum

1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

Pat Buchanan, talking sense again:

"President Likens Dewey to Hitler as Fascist Tool."

So ran the New York Times headline on Oct. 26, 1948, after what Dewey biographer Richard Norton Smith called a "particularly vitriolic attack in Chicago" by Harry Truman.

What brings this to mind is President Bush's assertion that we are "at war with Islamic fascism" and "Islamo-fascism."

After the transatlantic bomb plot was smashed, Bush said the plotters "try to spread their jihadist message I call – it's totalitarian in nature, Islamic radicalism – Islamic fascism; they try to spread it, as well, by taking the attack to those of us who love freedom."

What is wrong with the term Islamo-fascism?

First, there is no consensus as to what "fascism" even means. Orwell said when someone calls Smith a fascist, what he means is "I hate Smith. " By calling Smith a fascist, you force Smith to deny he's a sympathizer of Hitler and Mussolini.

As a concept, writes Arnold Beichman of the Hoover Institution, "fascism ... has no intellectual basis at all nor did its founders even pretend to have any. Hitler's ravings in 'Mein Kampf' ... Mussolini's boastful balcony speeches, all of these can be described, in the words of Roger Scruton, as an 'amalgam of disparate conceptions.'"

Richard Pipes considers Stalinism and Hilterism to be siblings of the same birth mother: "Bolshevism and fascism were heresies of socialism."

Since the 1930s, "fascist" has been a term of hate and abuse used by the left against the right, as in the Harry Truman campaign. In 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. claimed to see in the Goldwater campaign "dangerous signs of Hitlerism." Twin the words "Reagan, fascism" in Google and 1,800,000 references pop up.

Unsurprisingly, it is neoconservatives, whose roots are in the Trotskyist-social Democratic left, who are promoting use of the term. Their goal is to have Bush stuff al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran into the same "Islamo-fascist" kill box, then let Strategic Air Command do the rest.

But the term represents the same lazy, shallow thinking that got us into Iraq, where Americans were persuaded that by dumping over Saddam, we were avenging 9/11.

But Saddam was about as devout a practitioner of Islam as his hero Stalin was of the Russian Orthodox faith. Saddam was into booze, mistresses, movies, monuments, palaces and dynasty. Bin Laden loathed him and volunteered to fight him in 1991, if Saudi Arabia would only not bring the Americans in to do the fighting Islamic warriors ought to be doing themselves.

And whatever "Islamo-fascism" means, Syria surely is not it. It is a secular dictatorship Bush I bribed into becoming an ally in the Gulf War. The Muslim Brotherhood is outlawed in Syria. In 1982, Hafez al-Assad perpetrated a massacre of the Brotherhood in the city of Hama that was awesome in its magnitude and horror.

As with Gadhafi, whom Bush let out of the penalty box after he agreed to pay $10 million to the family of each victim of Pan Am 103 and give up his nuclear program, America can deal with Syria as Israel did after the Yom Kippur War – for an armistice on the Golan that has stuck, as both sides have kept the deal.

America faces a variety of adversaries, enemies and evils. But the Bombs-Away Caucus, as Iraq and Lebanon reveal, does not always have the right formula. Al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran all present separate challenges calling forth different responses.

Al-Qaida appears to exist for one purpose: Plot and perpetrate mass murder to terrorize Americans and Europeans into getting out of the Islamic world. Contrary to what Bush believes, the 9/11 killers and London and Madrid bombers were not out to repeal the Bill of Rights, if any ever read it. They are out to kill us, and we have to get them first.

Hamas and Hezbollah have used terrorism, but, like Begin's Irgun and Mandela's ANC, they have social and political agendas that require state power to implement. And once a guerrilla-terrorist movement takes over a state, it acquires state assets and interests that are then vulnerable to U.S. military and economic power.

Why did the ayatollah let the American hostages go as Reagan raised his right hand to take the oath of office? Why did Syria not rush to the rescue of Hezbollah? What did Ahmadinejad not rocket Tel Aviv in solidarity with his embattled allies in Lebanon? Res ipse loquitor. The thing speaks for itself. They don't want war with Israel, and they don't want war with the United States.

"Islamo-fascism" should be jettisoned from Bush's vocabulary. It yokes the faith of a billion people with an odious ideology. Imagine how Christians would have reacted, had FDR taken to declaring Franco's Spain and Mussolini's Italy "Christo-fascist."

If Bush does not want a war of civilizations, he will drop these propaganda terms that are designed to inflame passions rather than inform the public of the nature of the war we are in, and the war we are not in.

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Te futueo et caballum tuum

1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

Would you aggree that bush, cheney, rice, and others in the administration did a damn good job of at least insinuating the link, then backing off when directly asked?

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I`m contunually amazed that there are still bush appologists around taking up his defence with all that has come to light. And using one of the rovian tactics that those who disagree blame America for all the worlds ills as their wipping stick. It`s amazing.

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I`m contunually amazed that there are so many 'hate-America Firsters', etc.

Two examples of a form of argument that insult without enlightening.

B

Hey Bot, I think a good many of those HAF folks you are talking about actually don`t hate their country, they just want it to be a better country.

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