Woodlouse2002 wrote on Dec 21^st, 2006 at 5:36pm:



I understand your point.  Maybe I was implying the sort of terrorism that's currently going on now.  When we have a leader of a nation that is likely the chief national sponsor of global terrorism proclaim that everyone should convert to a certain religion or be destroyed, how can you negotiate with that?

dcunning30 wrote on Dec 21^st, 2006 at 9:16pm:

How can you stamp it out without causing religious genocide?

Scary thing is that the description fits Bush better than it does Hussein.

Chris_F wrote on Dec 22^nd, 2006 at 8:16am:



Based on well known facts, neither!   

Care to guess again?

dcunning30 wrote on Dec 22^nd, 2006 at 12:33pm:

I don't live in Oz.

Quote:

Are you talking about Iran there?

expat wrote on Dec 22^nd, 2006 at 12:41am:


You'll get no debate from me because I never said that.  And your point regarding increasing the liklihood of terrorism is debatable.  However, we do know Saddam was busy, such as paying the families of suicide bombers in Israel after the bombers have completed their acts of terror.  And let us not forget the mock-up of an airliner used for terror training found just outside Baghdad.  But prior to 9/11, the terrorist have been able to perform their terror activities with impunity.  For the most part, the world treated the terrorism as police responsibilities:  for the most part, arriving after the crime has been commited and seeking to bring the perpetrators to justice.  Post 9/11 means the battle had finally been joined.

What can be, and is being debated is whether post 9/11 activities in Iraq had any positive results or not.  I expect several with vehimately disagree with me, but my opinion is there were two catigories of mistakes in Iraq.  The first is intelligence failed to appreciate the difficulty of post-invasion Iraq.  Obviously, there were mistakes in this regard, but my opinion is many critics like to wax with wisdom, ignoring the fact that they are armed with the hindsight which is always 20/20 vision.

The second point, is in my opinion not a mistake, but is quite deliberate.  And I expect vehimate disagreement with this point as well.  I draw upon history to come to this conclusion, something I wish more people did when they form their opinions.  We can go all the way back to Viet Nam.  There were several catigories of mistakes there as well, but I will focus on the media, and the part it had to play.  At that time, global, electronic relatively real-time media was a fairly new concept.  There had been a growing anti-war movement in the states.  It was what it was and I will not explore it, but suffice it to say, the reporting of it reached the eyes and ears of the North Vietnamese.  The north calculated that the US will ultimately loose the will to fight.  After Tet in 1968, even though the US suffered great casualties, the NVA and the VC suffered more, and in fact they were demoralized and some even suggested they had lost the war.  But those on the battlefield were not privvy to the knowlege that the North's commanders had back in Hanoi.  The US was loosing the will to fight.  So the North just had to keep hanging on, and the US will ultimately give up.  And we know, that's exactly what did occur.

Now, fast forward to the US action in Somalia, what was an action to protect those feeding starving Somali's from the warring factions.  In the age of CNN, when there were several US casualties being shown on the news in real-time, President Clinton feared this would become domestically unpopular and withdrew the US forces.  Audience to this was Osama Bin Ladin, and he made that famous statement: The Americans cannot tolerate they soldiers being killed (as brought to their tv screens in the age of CNN).  He calculate the US would only respond with a tit for tat type of response, such as Clinton's cruise missles being shot into Afgani Al Qaeda camps.

Now fast forward to Iraq in the present.  We have a repeat of the same scenario that occurred in Viet Nam.  The constant media barrage, and clear bias that the coalition's actions in Iraq were ill-advices and should not have occurred in the first place, it serves to demoralize the troops and encourage the terrorists.  All they have to do is keep up, no matter how many of their numbers are lost, because the US will ultimately loose the will to fight.  And that is exactly what is happening right now.


Now, I expect to be quoted and challenged at length.  I've thought about this stuff for a long time.  I'm just offering my opinion.

dcunning30 wrote on Dec 26^th, 2006 at 3:14pm:


In 10 years of the Vietnam war as we all know 58,000 members of the armed forces died. The Iraq "problem" has been forecast to last up to 30 years or even a generation. What you be an acceptable figure of deaths before you would say, it cannot be won? As it stand we are at about 10 more troop deaths than people killed in the twin tower attacks.