The Man In Black wrote:
It can be argued that its just random chance that got them down, but given all the activity there I'm guessing we're doing something right, yes?
I never said it was a null action, I said I thought it would blow back on us. And as revolutio pointed out, there is a lot of other stuff going on in the world at the same time. Missiles falling on Hamas leaders, more governments cracking down, seizing assets, etc.
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I mean really, it gets right down to that, if you won't listen etc, your fault, not mine. Democracy, terror trap etc, whatever, in the end it benefits me to have this happening, thus I'm cool with it. We can go into a discussion as soon as you bring up an actual point, rather than saying we need to come up with a 'real' reason etc.
Here's my point, since you asked. I believe that the costs in finance, human lives, US goodwill, and political stability invading Iraq incurred greatly outweigh any of the potential benefits we're likely to reap. Despite the fact that I think our administration is stuffed with assholes, I like to believe that they are not idiots. So, I keep waiting for another unspoken motive to come to light in order to justify the tremendous costs of the war.
Admittedly wars have probably been fought for even less reason, but as Americans we expect accountability on the part of our leaders, right? So far, ollie's suggestion of not-so-subtle intimidation has made more sense than any of the other reasons I've heard.
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Re: 'one involves provoking outrage in the arab community.' The 'arab community' is rather inclusive, you're being racist there, I'm sorry, but "trap for terrorists" =/= provoking the 'arab community,' it means provoking the terrorists, duh?
I don't know why you're stuck on this, except that you seem to be trying to draw some kind of relationship between killing terrorists and pissing off Arabs..
So yeah. Most Arabs probably have little sympathy for terrorists. But they clearly <i>do</i> care about whether or not the US invades Iraq.
Invading Iraq provoked a lot of people.
Not just a few extremists.
Not just Arabs.
Not just Moslems.
But it sure does attract terrorists!
Of course, now there's no cooperation from the neighboring nations who ought to be helping get things running again. Instead of finessing the people who could help the most in rebuilding Iraq, we just bulled in. Now we're saying that we deliberately turned Iraq into a mess while we're supposed to be rebuilding a whole new kind of society?