Well, Claudia, it looks like you’ve drawn a swarm here . . .
zenless writes:
“Somehow, despite all the billions that Sadaam was stashing away, he didn’t give ANY to terrorist groups, and had no connection to Al-Quaeda (sorry, an agreement not to interfere doesn’t count as a connection).”
Saddam paid $260,000 dollars to 26 families of suicide bombers who plied their deadly trade against the Jews. So the claim that Saddam didn’t give money to terrorist groups, even if true (which I doubt but am too lazy to track down), is disingenuous in the extreme: he supported suicide bombing with cold, hard cash. End of story.
And as far as there being no connection between Saddam Hussein and al Queda, that assertion has been thoroughly debunked (see page 2, especially).
In passing, the notion that secularists like Saddam and Islamic fundamentalists would never make common cause is demonstrably false, given the recent alliance of Mr. Chavez and Mr. Achmadinejad at the UN.
The fact of the matter is that an Islamic trajectory of terror against the west and western modernity (especially the US) had been established well before 9/11, but it had been ignored by everyone, democrats and republicans alike, all of whom appear to have viewed the world through the postmodern (which is to say western) prism of race, class, gender and (western) oppression, rather than see it as the Islamic fascists see it.
(Hey! Aren’t postmodernists constantly telling us we create our own truth? Why would they deny that right to the Islamic fascists? And where it is written that we can understand Islamic fundamentalist “truth” according to our own profoundly western philosophical benchmarks? To try would be an exercise in ethnocentricty, would it not?)
What OBL managed to do with 9/11 was to create an incident that could neither be ignored nor responded to without causing a spike in the recruitment to his radical Islamic cause.
But it is not clear that we are any less safe for having invaded Iraq than we would be had we not. As one reader of Captain’s Quarters pointed out:
“One could just as well argue that invading North Africa in 1942 made America’s war with Germany far worse since before that the war was limited to shipping lanes and a few U-boat vs destroyer incidents.
One could argue that invading Virginia in 1861 made America’s war on the Confederacy worse.
One could argue that America’s War with Spain was a foreign skirmish on the other side of the globe until the invasion of Cuba.
It’s called waging war.”
I’m not a big supporter of Sen. McCain, but I find his point about the choice between war now and something far worse in the future to be very persuasive.
JM Hanes has it exactly right: “Criticism always assumes a return to the status quo ante, doesn’t it?”
For those who advocate negotiation: how do you persuade religious fundamentalists away from their deepest beliefs — their faith — by resorting to the same standards of logic, materialism, tolerance and democracy that they have specifically rejected, and have committed themselves to destroy?
Brian
