Chimbu ... I should've realised that before reading your latest post but perhaps it was just as well I hadn't. Seems there are others who got the same impression that I got. And, having formed that view, it was always going to be difficult to shake it.
Anyway mate, now that I know where you're coming from, I have to agree with you. It doesn't mean we think any less of the USA, or indeed of the suffering that has happened there. Nor is it a criticism - indeed, could any of us have done any better, given the all the same circumstances unfolding in the precise order in which they occurred?
So, okay, the question of the day now seems to be ... "what do we do about it?". We've all seen e-mails conveying the concept of atomic bombs raining down on Afghanistan, of turning the country into a vast lake. As a way of relieving our own tensions, these have been great, but hardly realistic.
As Slash has just pointed out, Oz isn't anywhere near as secure as most of us thought it was. We walk a tightrope now, but walk it we surely must. We cannot allow the sort of carnage that was inflicted on the USA to occur ever again.
PT ... it's posts like yours that make me understand just how much modern and ancient history I never absorbed at school, or in later life. But I'm not sure that any issues can be separated out, to look at any of the possibilities within Islam itself. I have the sinking feeling that all the events of history, inside and outside of Islam have brought us to this current low-point in world history.