Diesel8
Thank you for reminding us about the 'Irish Problem' and our inability to deal with it - please see the quote blow as mentioned so eloquently further up this thread
However, to our American cousins, please remember that we have lived with Irish terrorism for 30 years. We understand your pain. If we are a little insensitive it is probably because we have become somewhat harden to the brutality and indiscriminate nature of terrorism. I hope now that your President and Congress will fight to prevent ALL terrorism. As well as defeating bin Ladan and his various factions, it must also include the outlawing of organisations who support any terrorism, and in particular Irish terrorist groups. Organisations such as NORAID claim they are collecting for "Political Prisoners". No they are not. Their activities help fund the attrocities we have had in Manchester, Birmingham, Coventry, London and throughout Northern Ireland. You now have first hand experience of the effect well funded terrorists can have. Never has there been a greater opportunity to fight all terrorism.
This is not the appropriate time to start comparing countries records on terrorism or start jingoistically waving our dicks in the air with how better we are / you are.
Now is the time to gather friends and allies and coolly calculate how to run a sustained, coordinated and effective campaign against terrorism globally. Remember revenge is a dish best served cold.
The following quote was forwarded to me today and provided (I think) valuable food for thought
1. A former Afganastani's View
An Anonymous Writer's comments:
I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the
Stone Age." Ron Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would
mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this
atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What
else can we do?" Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing
whether we "have the belly to do what must be done." And I thought
about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from
Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never
lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will
listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.
I speak as one who deeply hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. My
hatred comes from first hand experience. There is no doubt in my mind
that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I
agree that something must be done about those monsters. But the Taliban
and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of
Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden
is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis.
When you think Bin Laden,think Hitler. And when you think "the people of
Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps." It's not only
that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first
victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in
there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international
thugs holed up in their country.
Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The
answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering.
A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000
disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a country with no economy, no food.
There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these
widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the
farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons
why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban. We come now to
the question of "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age". Trouble
is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the
Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done.
Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their
hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from
medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that. New
bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least
get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban
eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and
hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they
don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over
Kabul and dropping bombs would not really be a strike against the
criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making
common cause with the Taliban--by raping once again the people they've
been raping all this time. So what else is there? What can be done,
then?
Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin
Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of
"having the belly to do what needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly
to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms
about killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads out of the sand. What's
actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some
Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's
hideout. It's much bigger than that folks. Because to get any troops to
Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not
likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim
nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. We're flirting with a world
war between Islam and the West. And guess what: that's Bin Laden's program.
That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this. Read his speeches and
statements. It's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the
west. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world
into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the west wreaks a
holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to
lose, that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong, in
the end the West would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would
last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the
belly for that? Unfortunately, Bin Laden does. Anyone else?
