Leave to the Judd Brothers to impute any criticism Western hegemony with the terrorists whom they love to hate.

Anonymous:

You don't hate them?

Dear

Did you leave out the word "it" and "has"? What's not to hate about terrorists?

I hate our response to terrorism.
Our military/industrial leadership is like a sack of rotten meat that is burdening the American people. And instead of getting rid of the rotten aspects of our government, we swat at the terrorists who grow from our violence like flies.
There are many more reasons more the enemies of the United States to hate us than there are for us the hate them; Since WWII we have presided over the deaths of millions of innocent people, whereas 9/11 (which, incidentally, could have been prevented by the government, but was purposefully allowed to happen) and the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is the only beef that we have against an imaginary and faceless enemy.
Its easy to call someone a terrorist after their dead. And its even easier to kill someone with brown skin and a complicated name.
I hate the violence that begets violence.

So the answer is, no.

How can vicious men with guns and bombs be both imaginary AND faceless?

No the answer is yes, i hate mindless violence against innocents, so I hate the terrorist, but you have blinded yourself to the ways in which we are just as guilty as the terrorists, because you have chosen to see the world in a certain way and chose to ignore some violence and remember other violence.
Open up your mind and be a good Christian; love thy neighbor, turn the other cheek, and treat others as you would have them do unto you. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, and we're lucky thats not the case because we have done a lot more damage than we have received.

Ratbert, when you say vicious men, are you talking about US troops, or the Middle Easterners who are fighting against our imperializing them.
The terrorists are fighting a guerilla battle because they have to; and they will win, despite our best efforts. And because they hide, they are faceless, and it permits our country to do devasting damage to civilians and call them insurgents after they are dead.

If I were to become a genocidal tyrant or a terrorist I'd hope someone would kill me.

Anonymous:

If you think the Ba'athists and al Qaeda are going to run Iraq you're dreaming.

Anonymous:

I'm afraid another injunction applies more directly to your situation.

"If the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!" (Matthew 6)

Jim, im not sure how that applies, could you elaborate?
Oj, that precisely my point; we are in a compromised position to criticize the terrorists when we regularly engage in the killing of innocents, and/or support those who do so.
The Ba'thists are a dying breed; i don't know if you are aware of this, but we helped them come to power in the first place when the CIA started helping Saddam and others assassinate their political rivals back in the late 60's. They were our best friends throughout the 1980's, and we even sold them some handy equipment that was used to slaughter Shiites and Kurds (along with the Iranians, who your buddy Reagan was also supporting, illegaly. Why sell to one side in a war when you can sell to both. Sure was profitable in WWII when were were selling to the Nazis and the Allies before we entered the war.)
I don't know who will come to power in Iraq, but we will not win this fight without slaughering the millions who are ready to die to resist our installment of a puppet government. We can keep propping one up, but they are going to come right back down; we should have learned this decades ago.

Anonymous:

Please tell me (and I'm seriously asking), what would you have the leadership of this nation do to effectivly combat terrorism?

Anonymous -

Using metaphor is more complicated than it looks -- sometimes it's better to just come right out and say it. e.g.: I've never heard of a person being burdened by meat, not to mention that meat, especially rotten meat, is rarely if ever kept in sacks, especially not sacks that people carry around with them. Also, flies grow up from maggots not violence. And are we imagining faceless enemies or do we have some enemies who are imaginary and some who are faceless? I hate the metaphor that begets confusing imagery.

Anon, if I ever find myself living under a sadistic tyrant like Saddam Hussein, you have my permission to overthrow said tyrant, even if it means there is a possibility that you will accidentally drop a bomb on me and my family. You would do me no favors by appeasing said tyrant out of concern for me. As the wise man said, "give me Liberty, or give me death!".

Dan:

George Bush was a teen in the 60s--I was a child. Do you believe in blood guilt?

There aren't millions of people in Iraq "ready to die" to resist "a puppet government" - if there were, the U.S. would already have been kicked out.

Further, the Kurds and Shi'ites don't see the new government as being anything but their own.

Whenever America acts militarily, innocents die, but ACCIDENTALLY. Terrorists TARGET innocents.

Anyone who cannot discern a difference has an acute analytical impairment - and also cannot understand what's the big deal about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

Anonymous:

To combat terrorism, we should stop terrorizing and supporting the terrorists. That means withdrawing our military bases in the middle east and elsewhere, and ceasing to support for brutal governments like Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt, Uzbekistan and others. We need to stop preventing democracies from sprouting where it would be commercially inconvenient to do so. We need to stop propping up people (like Saddam) who will become nuisances in the future.
We also need to change our wasteful consumption so that it won't be necessary to support such violence in the world. We need to find an alternative to excessive use of petroleum products. We need to develop an alternative infrastructure to the suburban/one car to every person trend that will inevitably become more and more expensinve to maintain.
We have built a society that is too grandiose to maintain itself, and the only answer that both Democrats and Republicans want to give us is "more". Im saying "less."

Dan is describing the perfect war: they are ready to die and we are ready to kill them.

He and anon. are writing as though it matters whether or not our country deserves to survive or whether we should go under because of what may have happened 30 or 40 years ago.

We need to remember that we had bigger fish to fry in those days, and that we fried them quite well. Even if it were true that some of our present inconveniences were exacerbated by actions taken to bring down the FORMER SOVIET UNION, we are not about to commit suicide out of remorse.

Michael
There are millions in the Middle East (which i was refering to), but they are powerless to anything but the type of guerrila tactics that we see every day. They are suicidal, but they arent stupid. Usually people who go around openly criticizing the US goverment havent lasted too long, unless they are too reknowned or protected (like notable Muslim clerics) for us to assassinate, which like Saddam, we are not above.
No, i guess i can't discern the difference. When more innocents are dying than soldiers, is it really an accident? An accident is when you stub your toe; how many innocents have to die before we stop sayin "oops."
Do you think that our military didnt know what it was getting itself into when it invaded Iraq? Give them more credit than that.
Oj, i don't know what you are talking about.

Anon: Welcome to BrothersJudd. Pull up a chair and stay awhile. We love having dissenters around the place. Nothing is more boring than preaching to the choir. "Boy, that John Kerry's a nit." "Yeap, quite a nit." "A nit, you've really hit it on the head." "Wouldn't you say he's more of a louse?" See what I mean -- boring.

Just for the record, the Ba'athist coup was not the CIA's doing, though it did have contacts with the Ba'athists. Should it not have? Saddam's coup against the then Ba'athist leadership had nothing to do with the CIA.

We stayed out of the Iran/Iraq war until it looked like the Iranian invasion might succeed. We didn't want Iran to control Iraq, and wanted to avoid the "destabilization" that would occur if a Persian shi'ite regime overthrew a Sunni Arab regime. I think we were right to care about Iranian control of Iraq, wrong to worry about destabilization. We gave Iraq some decent intelligence, and sold them a small amount of arms. We did not sell them any chemical or biological weapons. They did get, with our agreement, some dual-use precurser chemicals and, as part of an agricultural program, some anthrax spores that were freely available to anyone who wanted them. There is no evidence that the material we supplied ever made its way into the Iraq's WMDs. The anthrax certainly didn't.

While we're on the subject, Osama was not a CIA asset during the Afghani war. The CIA funded and supplied the Mujahadeen. Osama funded the "Arabs" who fought in Afghanistan. There was no overlap and, although there was probably some coordination through Pakistani intelligence, Osama was not in any way a CIA asset.

By the same token, CIA had nothing to do with the Taliban. The word Taliban means, more or less, the Madrassa students. They are called that because, during the war against the Russians, they were in Madrassas in Pakistan. They moved back after the Russans withdrew and the puppet government fell. Well afterwards, they moved into the power vacuum created by the sparring warlords. Some of the warlords, who made common cause with the Taliban, did work with CIA during the Russian war.

Israel was formed by the United Nations after it took over administration of the British mandate in Palestine. (The "mandate", by the way, was given to the British by the League of Nations, the UN precurser, after WWI, when it divied up the Ottoman Empire.) The US was luke-warm, expecting Israel, with its close ties to Russia, to be a member of the socialist block. The USSR, for the same reason, worked hard for the creation of Israel. Israel is the David Souter of nations. The Palestinians could have had a state in '49 and at any time thereafter, if they had wanted one. They didn't. The great crime against them was the refusal of the other Arab states to absorb the refugees, who mostly left Israel voluntarily, secure in the knowledge that the Jews would soon be pushed into the sea.

All US wars were unnecessary.

Lou,
What kind of threat was posed by Saddam Hussein? Just as in the Cold War, which was a cover for imperializing south and central america, africa, the middle east, and southeast asia, along with engorging the military machine who's profits feed the corporate leaders of the world.
The first step of starting a war is constructing a common and easily identifiable enemy that needs to be faught: Hitler did it with Jews, we did it with the Communists, and now the terrorists. But the enemy can't be too specific (IE faceless, imaginary) or else it would be difficult to justify the slaughter of those who don't fit into such a narrow category. So in this war, we are permitted to kill almost any Middle Easterner (unless they are Christian and Jewish) because Americans, by and large, are ignorant of the differences that color the landscape of the Middle East. If we were really concerned with deposing tyrants, we should have eliminated Hussein while he was in the act of slaughtering his own people, but we couldn't because we were still making money off him.

David,

Im glad that someone with some real information, even though i dont agree with all of it, had finally decided to start posting. It leaves me a little unclear as to what your position is in relation to the debate, which is sort revolving around the question how the United State should be acting in response to the terrorist attacks of the past few years. I would love to debate this more, but i have to go. I really wish we could continue this debate during regular hours, mon-fri, where i will be trying provoking some of the idiots on this website while i neglect the job that i am supposed to be doing.

"No one will be more pleased than Osama bin Laden with the new measures announced by Tony Blair. He will be even more pleased should the prime minister succeed in turning his plans into legislation."

Wrong ... I'm more pleased.

Dan and Nanon, thank you for the service you have provided. For me at least, restricting my internet time to mostly conservative viewpoints, you have reminded me that there are still many among us who continue to confuse history with leftwing propaganda. A perfect reminder of how far our educational system has declined, really failed, under "Progressive" domination. How far the Howard Zinns of the world have taken us down since the "Renaissance" of the 60's.

You have my sympathy; how dark and forbidding your world view must be since the decline of Socialist totalitarianism.

Thank heavens for the new generation forthcoming.

Dan:

You're arguing that because the West made a mistake in the past the Shi'ites should suffer today because we're too tainted to ever help anyone. That's blood guilt.

Dan/Anon (you are one and the same, aren't you?)

As you are big on facts and research, you might be interested to know that, according to a 2003 study by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (not kindred spirits of Brothersjudd, believe me), the U.S. provided less than 1% of Hussein's arms from 1983-2001. China, Russia and France together provided 87%.

Hey, do you think maybe they stayed out of the war because they didn't want to be hypocritical?

I don't think he's arguing anything at all. Rather he's projecting, in the usual way, his own guilt or disappointment over [ fill in the blank, default = "having been born" ] onto his country, because he's been taught to, and because it seems safe. Which it is -- safe -- so long as we don't attain a critical mass of danonymousity.

Dan asks, "What kind of threat was Saddam Hussein?"

Saddam Hussein was potentially a mortal threat. We did not know that he lacked weapons of mass destruction, and in addition to his history of using them against his own people, he did everything in his power to make us think that he did (i.e., kicking out inspectors, refusing to open up to full inpections thereafter to lift sanctions).

9/11 taught that we must take our sworn enemies seriously -- i.e., we must believe them when they say they want to kill us, and we must act proactively to prevent them form having the opportunity.

9/11 also taught that non-state actors can cause real damage.

Saddam was a sworn enemy of the United States who consistently expressed his desire to do us in. He supported non-state terrorists against US allies (giving $25,000 to the families of suicide bombers vs. Israeli civilians).

The possibility that Saddam would decide that he could strike a blow for Arab fascism against the US by untraceably (and therefore un-deterrably and un-punishably) slipping WMD to non-state actors who would use it against the US was too great for any responsible President to permit after 9/11. So that's reason number 1 why we were right to have destroyed his regime. The fact that he turned out not to have WMD is of no consequence. Saddam's strategy of maintaining the fiction that he had them deserved to come a cropper.

Plus, and here's the key thing the left refuses to let itslef understand, is that there is no way to end the Islamist threat against the US without changing the political culture of the Middle East. And there are two prerequisites for making that change: (1) demonstrating that the current pan-Arab fascism is not a winning path (which you do by defeating it militarily) and (2) doing something so that the hoped-for alternative, liberal democracy, has a dog in the fight for the future of the Middle East (which we now have -- baby democratic Iraq, which didn't exist before). So that's reason number 2 why we are doing exactly what we should be doing.

I'm sorry, but reading your posts, you have a pathological tendency to interpret every fact and (especially) every non-fact and fiction against your own country. That's extremely unattractive, and you shouldn't be surprised if the overwhelming majority of your countrymen hate you for it. You insult all of us.

Didn't Saddam Hussein father a failed plot to kill former President Bush? If so then that alone is enough reason to take him and his regime out.

Shelton:

Yes, Saddam was behind a plot to kill G.H.W. Bush as he visited Kuwait, during the Clinton years...

IIRC, Clinton lobbed a few cruise missiles into Iraq as payback.

Beat me to it, Shelton. One could write a whole dissertation on the state of moden international (and even domestic) politics on the fact that neither the left nor the right pays any attention to that outrage.

Yes, had Saddam actually killed Bush 41, then Bill Clinton would have had to invade Iraq (or, at the least kill 10,000 Ba'athists, including der Leader). Not a pretty thought (with Les Aspin as SecDef and Warren Christopher at State).

Dan, here's a poem I wrote many, many years ago:

offer no
reason to
hate: sancti
monius love
no civilized
spite to be
spoken of
no plea bar
gaining eyes
blinking
compromise
inking temp
oral peace
that we'll
grow to
despise

Feel free to love your local terrorist as you love yourself -- just remember that you are not loving your law-abiding neighbor by doing so when he is blown up because of your complacency and cowardice.

But that has nothing to do with Christianity, which is based on Judaism and law enforcement. As a matter of fact, pacifists are hypocrites the very moment they open their mouths. If you really believe in turning the other cheek, you'd just shut up, wouldn't you?

Remember, Jesus said that there is no greater love than giving your life to save another. That is exactly what our family members, relatives, friends and neighbors in the military are doing out there in Iraq. Your suggestion that my wife's cousin, for instance, is out in Iraq murdering innocents is despicable and shows you to have a very cynical and black heart.

Oh, and you're welcome to call me an "idiot" if you think it will somehow prove you to be a pacifist and a Christian. That is something I don't mind turning the other cheek to.