Cool. I was worried you were part of the fringe which does see them as equivalent. No harm, no foul.
Of course. That’s why I referenced Realpolitik. There’s nobody strong enough to force us to do so. Unlike the case with the Taliban. They should’ve known that.
And yet their strength as an organization continues to increase and they still haven’t turned over bin Laden. Fancy that.
You’d almost think they were looking for a fight…
They already fought one superpower, why not two?
Threatening a country’s economic interests is not the same thing as threatening a country. Nationalizing oil companies is not the same thing as flying airplanes into buildings.
An illustrative example of this (and not the only one by far) is the postwar history of Iran. The democratically-elected president, Mohammed Mossadeq, heavily favored nationalizing the Iranian oil industry, thereby keeping oil profits in the country instead of going to Britain. He was overthrown in a US/UK-engineered coup (called Operation Ajax in CIA files) and replaced by the Shah in 1953. Anyone alive back in 1979 knows how that eventually turned out.
Iran wasn’t harboring the 1950s version of al-Qaeda or run by the 1950s Taliban. They weren’t planning attacks on the Empire State Building or the Pentagon or the White House, and yet because the US and Great Britain didn’t like the idea of losing the lucrative oil profits Iran generated, they went in and overthrew a democratically-elected head of state. This is where anti-Americanism comes from, and this is how militant Islamists who have planned attacks like September 11 gain sympathy and support.
Afghanistan and Iraq don’t have the exact same history as Iran, but the underlying logic of US and Soviet involvement has been the same.
And after us, there’s always China.
I don’t think even the Taliban themselves would say they’re doing better now than they were before the invasion. They were in control of the whole country then, and now they’re in control of perhaps one tenth.
I do think our continuing failure to apprehend bin Laden makes us look pretty effing bad. We had a legitimate justification for invading Afghanistan and to all intents and purposes we’ve now abandoned it. That wouldn’t be so bad if we hadn’t invaded Iraq shortly afterwards with no justification at all.
I know the reasons for ousting Mossadegh in Iran and our involvement in that was unfortunate to say the least, but in Afghanistan they really actually threatened us. I have friends who were there on 9/11, luckily none of my friends was killed.
I’m not sure what your point regarding Iran is though? What does that have to do with troops in Afghanistan?
Question asked, so far unanswered: why do you think that the Taliban could have handed over ObL had they wanted to? I remember we were told that such was the case, but the people who told us so, well, their record for candor is kinda spotty. “Poxed” might be the better word.
But you believe them? Why?
I think that was in support of the point you were questioning, which is if we’d let them be if they were democracies but still didn’t like us.
Psst. It was.
I don’t think that the Taliban would have ever willingly done that, but if they had wanted to, maybe they could have, maybe not. It probably would have taken a pretty intense betrayal to pull it off though.
At the very least, they could have looked like they were doing something about the matter.
Ah! Quite right! Your answer was “No, I don’t know”. My mistake, I’m so used to people who are embarassed to admit that they rely on insinuation, innuendo, and ignorance. Your approach is refreshing!
Ahh yes, that does make sense then doesn’t it?
Our treatment of Mossadegh was one of the lower points in American history for certain. There’s also no evidence that Iran would’ve been hostile to us with a nationalized oil company.
I’ve a feeling you’re doling out a bit of your famous sarcasm (of which, I am generally a fan). If not, my apologies.
However, that wasn’t quite what I was getting at. My point was that the Taliban themselves didn’t give as their reasoning for refusal to hand over OBL “we can’t do that, because he’s not here”. Rather, it was, “we won’t do that, because we don’t think he’s responsible”.
So? Don’t we need a bit more than that to start a war over? And give buttloads of benjamins to some of the worst human offal on the face of this Earth?
These are argument sabout whether or not to go to war, though. They are political arguments that should not be settled for us by the military.
Here’s a hypothetical: Suppose, upon being ordered to leave Fallujah, the troops there decided that it would be immoral to leave the civilian population at the mercy of gangs and militias. Would they be equally worthy of praise for refusing to stand down as the recently converted COs are?
I’ll say it again - threatening a country’s economic interests is not the same thing as threatening a country. Yet the US and Great Britain treated the economic threat of Iranian oil nationalization as if it were a genuine military threat, and using that excuse to go in and deliberately sabotage a country’s democratically-elected government. That is the kind of thing that sets the stage for people who do want to physically threaten the US to step up and put their plans into action.
My point - you get it, though you seem to think I’m making the opposite argument - is that Iran likely wouldn’t have been physically hostile to the US if they’d been allowed to nationalize their oil industry. If they’d been allowed to control their own resources they might have been happy to sell it to the US and use the proceeds to improve their country. As it was, they got stuck with a tyrannical monarch who was more than happy to sell oil to the US and use the proceeds to further enrich himself. Most Iraqis likely wouldn’t be hostile to the US now if the US hadn’t tolerated another tyrannical dictator whose horrible atrocities were winked at as long as he opposed Iran, only to then go in and bomb the shit out of the country when he got too big for his britches. Most Afghanis likely wouldn’t be hostile to the US if their country hadn’t been used as a staging ground for a proxy war to bleed the USSR dry economically where backwards, arch-conservative fundamentalists got training and support because they hated Communists more than they hated the US - at least, that is, until the Reds weren’t around to hate anymore.
This hostility isn’t ascribable simply to fundamentalist Islam, although it is a force behind the hostility. If the argument “The US is only here to throw its weight around and make sure we ask ‘How high?’ when ordered to jump” didn’t make any sense, the idea that the US ought to be attacked would not have the traction it did prior to 2001 - and arguably has now.
saoirse, the gangs and militias are there in Iraq and have a power base there precisely becausethe US military has been in Fallujah and all around Iraq destroying the country’s economy and political life. If Iraq were still enjoying a standard of living close to what it had prior to the First Gulf War (and this is not an endorsement of Saddam Hussein, just a statement of economic fact) those same gangs and militias wouldn’t be the threat they are now. These wars are not achieving anything and they are creating more problems than they are solving.
Just pulled this article off a quick Google search. Has this been thoroughly debunked/exposed as a hoax/whatever?