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Originally posted by jaguar
Ok, so you bomb the shit out of Afghanistan. Kill bin laden, maybe a few of his top cronies if you’re lucky too. Wait 5 years and the next leader gets to add the bombing to his list of pretty reasonably grievances (and like griff I agree with the motives, not the methods). It does. Not. Solve. The. Issue.
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Even if I accept this scenario (and I don't; it would only result from doing a half-assed job), that's 5 years of attacks prevented. Not so bad. And since these assholes are going to have grievances which will be accepted by their fellow fanatics whether reasonable or not, one more isn't going to make a difference.
Just what do you expect the US to do? This isn't like the Pan Am bombing where the US could afford to let the attackers hole up in Libya for a decade or so -- these guys aren't just guilty of a far larger crime, they are still actively running their organization. Last minute offers to send Osama to some neutral country of the Taliban's choosing are pretty clear phony delaying tactics; of course the US will pay no attention to them.
If you want to solve the issue, there's two ways to go about it. One is to destroy Al-Queda and any other organization involved in terrorism. This means destroying all their fixed assets (hence Afghanistan), killing or imprisoning anyone with a position of power within the organization, infiltrating or destroying all their means of comunication, confiscating or destroying their movable assets, etc. The other is total isolationism. Not just withdrawing our military from everywhere around the world, but no longer exporting US culture -- no more McDonalds and Coke overseas. No more American movies or TV or music exported. We just withdraw into our shell and give the Islamic fundamantalists nothing to hate; we become a big zero in the world. The terrorists would call this a victory, of course -- and they'd be right.
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Policies of appeasement have had some spectacular failures *coughww2cough* but people don't kill themselves without a good reason.
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People kill themselves without a good reason all the time. Policies of appeasment have had spectacular failures (not just WWII -- there's an old expression, "Once you've paid the Danegeld, you'll never be rid of the Dane"). Have they had ANY successes?