Thank you Mary, for your cool rational and well-expressed comments. I can’t really debate with people like Susan who keep attributing things to me I never said and then attacking me for them. For instance, I am not a Muslim, Marxist, socialist or anti-American and I never voted for Gordon Brown. I am not anti-Israel (though I have severe reservations about her illegal occupation of Arab land). Also, a close friend of mine was injured in New York on 9/11 so I was not “cheering on sept 12 screaming that USA deserved it bla bla bla”. Neither can I see why Sharia law keeps popping up in this debate. I was actually in the States a few weeks back, and enjoyed my stay and was made very welcome. Not all of my American friends are pro-Obama but they have all had a rueful chuckle at the xenophobic racism of some of these contributers. So, to your comment Mary. What would I do? Well firstly, I think Obama’s analysis of the situation is correct. We (and I include us Brits in this) should have kept our eye on the ball and put all our initial military effort into Afghanistan. Bush already had plans for invading Iraq and it is well documented that Rumsfield was desperate to link Iraq to 9/11. However despicable Saddam Hussein was (and remember, it was Rumsfield who delivered him his WMD in the first place), it would have made much more sense to have gone after Al Quaeda with everything we had! The Iraq invasion was a colossal blunder by a leadership obsessed with oil. Obama is right about another thing. If we took our troops out of Iraq and put more on the ground in Afghanistan we would lessen the likelihood of horrific (and all-too common) mistakes which, sadly, become inevitable when you bomb from a great height! This sort of mistake hardly endears us to the population and simply acts as a ‘recruiting sergeant’ for the Taliban (who, by the way, I agree are truly odious!). I note your comment about the Saudi’s (George W.’s special friends) who, by exporting their fundamentalist brand of Islam via the madrassas, have actually fueled the whole situation. I find it so strange that the USA continually makes the wrong choice in friends. Not only are they pally with the Saudis, but the list goes back a long way: Noriega, Saddam, Somoza, all the nasty Latin American generals. I have been in Pakistan, and the Middle-East, and have met and talked to both radical Islamics and the moderates, and once again, the USA keeps scoring ‘own goals’ whenever it mistakenly blows innocent civilians to pieces. It may seem like a good military strategy to bomb somewhere on of off-chance you might kill a ‘bad-guy’ but like all those failed attempts to assasinate Saddam from the air, every time you kill innocent bystanders, you make the job of winning hearts and minds more difficult. Hope this makes my (sadly nuanced) position more clear.
