Harmor wrote:
Eugefunk84 wrote:
Mostly, I just think we should mind our own business and not interfere with other countries. What do you think got us into this mess in the first place?
We did in the 80's and 90's but they still attacked us. Since we do business all around the world we have interests, embassies, and tourists that have been attacked by Extremist Muslims.
True, and we've been attacked by more than just extremist Muslims. I don't think many people are naive enough to think that all attacks would end if we became more isolationist -- there would just be less attacks.
Harmor wrote:
Ideally if we had all our troops out of Japan, out of Korea, out of Germany and out of the Middle east and NOT retaliated when Bin la din attacked us on 9/11, I believe that they would STILL continue to attack us.
Agreed, but 9/11 could have been prevented if our intelligence agencies had been cooperating with each other. The fact that such a complex plan succeeded on almost every level shows that we need to improve the synergy our intelligence agencies.
Harmor wrote:
I agree with you that less people would probably be dead, but the people who died because as a result of our actions are terrorists killing thousands of innocent civilians. Are we responsible when a terrorist blows a car bomb in downtown Baghdad? Remember Saddam killed thousands of people (350,000 Kurdish men, women and children in 1992), and thousands each year to keep his people repressed.
If you believe we are responsible when a terrorist blows a car bomb and kills innocent civilians then what if that terrorists then blew up our citizens? Am I suggesting that Americans are 'worth more' than Iraqis. Yes I am.
You'll get no argument from me on this one. I don't think we're responsible for the actions of the insurgency. We may have created a situation where an insurgency now exists in Iraq, but it's not our fault that so many extremists flood Iraq right now. That's mostly the fault of Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Harmor wrote:
Look what they do in Europe? The Spanish train bombings were successfully to get Spain to pull out of Iraq. The bombings in the UK (7-7 bombings), have a less of an effect because I believe the Brits are used to all the IRA bombings. The Islamification of Europe is happening at an increasing alarming rate...how soon should we expect Sharia law to be the law of the land?
Now this is just fearmongering. The U.K. has stood up very admirably to the terrorism of a few nutcases. Sharia law will not be imposed, not by a longshot.
It won't happen in Spain either, but they deal with terrorism in a different way from the U.K....
Harmor wrote:
I believe we were justified in attacking Afghanistan. We attacked Iraq because we believed they would ally with the terrorists. Also the fact that Saddam was being an ass and not cooperating with the U.N. If Saddam cooperated with the U.N. he would still be in power and we would still be enforcing the No-Fly-Zone. Every major intelligence service at the time believed that Saddam was working on WMDs - in retrospect we could not find those weapons (I believe they went into Syria), but part of that was Saddam was probably giving disinformation to foreign governments to prop-up the effectiveness of their military.
Afghanistan was justified, I agree. Iraq was the mother of all bad ideas. The Democrats can be blamed for lobbying hard for war in the late 90s, and the Republicans can be blamed for doing the same in the years leading up to the war.
Harmor wrote:
If we don't disrupt their financial networks or fight them wherever they are then we will loose this battle of civilizations. We might as well put the Cresent-Star flag over the White House right now if we don't fight them.
Can you reason with a terrorist? No. You kill them just like you would a rat or a cockroach. To do anything less than that means you just prolong your demise.
I'm all for preventing terrorists from entering our country and executing the ones we find here, but we must move away from the Middle East. It's nothing but trouble for us. This a fight that Muslims must figure out for themselves. The two exceptions to this are Afghanistan and Pakistan.
We're making progress in Afghanistan, and we could make a lot more if we weren't tied down in Iraq. Pakistan is a nation that must be watched closely. In the event of Musharraf's fall, we have no choice but to invade.
