From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Tue Jul 30 2002 - 15:47:50 MDT
On 30 Jul 2002 at 13:15, Ben wrote:
> [Nurgle]
> "Afghanistan, where the US have wrestled a country from a
> funamentalist theocracy, which they helped install by supplying arms
> and
> training because the alternative would have been a communist
> government, and we can't let baby eaters run even more country, can
> we?"
>
> [Joe]
> There is no argument that we shouldn't have cut and run after the
> USSR was expelled, Vietnam-style, from Afghanistan, leaving it to the
> tender mercies of terrorists and fundamentalists supported by the
> Pakistani ISI and madrasas and Saudi money.
>
> [ben]
> Huh? So, setting up terrorists and criminal organizations in other countries
> is Ok as long as we dismantle them after they no longer server questionable
> American interests? Sounds like you're just trying to shift blame to other
> countries no more opportunistic than your own.
>
We made a cost-benefit analysis that inflicting a Vietnam-style defeat
upon the Soviet Union was worth supporting Islamic fundamentalists in the
region (we saw no way to facilitate this defeat without such support); even
though this defeat was partially responsible for the disillusion, dissolution
and breakup of the USSR and their subsequent embrace of democracy,
we are presently dealing with the Islamic fundamentalist blowback from
that decision. We should have done then (when the Soviets left) what we
are doing now; encouraging a moderate and participatory democracy
there, while attempting to attenuate some of the more rabid strains of
islamic fundamentalism that we had previously encouraged as a means to
that end.
I do not see another country where we are pursuing the same type of
policy; in fact, in the Phillipines, we are engaged in strengthening their
government's control over areas that have been threatened by an Al
Quaeda-linked Islamic terrorist insurgency that had partially morphed into
a kidnap-for-money enterprise.
>
> -ben
>
>
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