OK, but even so I would still question what OBL considers ‘honesty’ and ‘truth’ in such context.
And Bush said God told him to invade Iraq.
In that situation I would know that while Osama is a sort of figurehead of the fundamentalist tribe, he cannot really control them any more than, say, Yasser Arafat could control the terrorists he spawned. The best we could get Osama to do is disengage and, maybe, while he’s at it, turn witness on and betray as many of his colleagues as possible. While he may lay down his own weapons, I would not expect him to betray his brothers-in-arms, and probably would not want to even talk to him. I’d send Stephen Hadley to do it.
I hope you think the same of George W Bush and his administration, just for equivalencies sake. Unless of course you believe the lives of American civilians are more valuable than the lives of Iraqi civilians in which case you’ll be in the clear in my book. I’ll disagree with you, but it’ll be a stance that doesn’t require a heavy amount of denial.
I would say, if he’ll turn himself in to sign the documents, then we’ll accept the truce, then I’d try him in a court of law for the murder of 3000 people. However, it would be sticky in this case because I wouldn’t be a murderer like George W Bush if I were president. I wouldn’t have invaded Iraq if I were president.
Basically it’s not worth much, because he’s only one guy. There isn’t much to be done. I am not saying to DO anything really. I am simply offering an alternative perspective to the automatons who think that every murderer is a liar also.
Erek
I respect your answer. You and I both have Bin Laden in the same federal courthouse which we tried his associates in for the first bombing of the WTC. They are incarcerated, and being treated humanely. They have NOT been beheaded. In fact, they have legal counsel, and have been engaged in a series of appeals under American law for over a decade now.
I do NOT accept your characterization of the US administration however. The use of civilian aircraft, filled with passengers, and crashed into non-military targets, does NOT have any equivalent US action that I am aware of. If we have done such things, I need you to give me some specifics. Perhaps start a US War Crimes thread.
I am sure that some innocent Iraqi citizens have been killed. As have some Afghans. There lives are every bit as valuable as Americans. BUT… and here is the point where we part big time… we are not slaughtering them intentionally. We did not use agents to infiltrate Iraqi commercial flights and crash them into Iraqi offices.
You have a perfect right to disagree with the war, and with any war if you feel strongly about it. Different conversation.
One more point. Please don’t confuse me with a Republican supporter of Bush. I am neither of those things. For one thing, I think he is not very bright. I also think he has been much too conservative in his prosecution of this war. He needs to be MUCH more aggressive in hunting the leadership down, and crushing the insurgency. But that’s just me.
When in doubt, the classics are the best bet. Anthony McAuliffe would approve. 
When it comes to bin Laden, I say
No truce. No “treaty”. No quarter. No mercy. No rest.
He should be hounded and hunted until he no longer lives.
Gringo_Miami It’s very easy to take the moral highground when you are numerically, and technologically more powerful. We didn’t hijack planes because we own aircraft carriers. We own aircraft carriers because we’ve been destabilizing third world countries in order to keep them poor so that we can afford the weapons that we use to enslave them. I guess we just see it differently. I don’t think that someone who shoots someone in the head with a gun is better than someone who beats someone to death with a rock, even though most people consider the beating more grisly.
Erek
Erek
Who have we enslaved? Are the Iraqi or Afghan people being forced to produce goods for American corporations? Last I heard, the Afghans, being good capitalists, are busy re-establishing the opium fields the Taliban shut down.
Hmmm… maybe our enslavement of people are the East Europeans who escaped Soviet enlightenment? nahhh… OK… its the Japanese we conquored with our military might in WWII – they are so enslaved we require them to make cars, TVs and computers for us. The Africans? ooops, we stopped enslaving them a while back.
Are you are changing the discussion from civilian causalties and barbarism by one of the combatants (AQ) to a discussion of capitalist exploitation of the third world? Pullleeeaaaseee… go tell it to the Chinese govt. They know how to enslave their own people… even if it means selling those products to us. We obviously can’t do it all by ourselves.
I think your basic issue is that you think it is patently unfair of us to shoot back at these folks with multi-million dollar weapons systems. War is NOT fair. It is not pretty. Argue whether it is just… that is legitimate debate. But spare the Big Bad aircraft carrier stuff… anyone who kills my people is going to be shot back at… with almost everything we have. There are other weapons which even I don’t advocate using… at this time.
That’s better then mine. I was going to suggest he be dropped off in times square with wearing a big sandwhich board sating “I am Osama” and let the New York streets take their toll.
Yeah, that too. My problem is that in that situation he would suffer for a finite period of time.
What the hell does Osama have to do with Iraq?
It isn’t suddenely “right” for us to be there just because Osama shakes his dick at us. The war in Iraq is wrong, period. It’s beyond stupid to say that we should stay there and get more people killed just to win a pissing contest with bin Laden.
I say take the truce. We have nothing to lose by it. We’ve killed more innocent people than bin Laden has and I actually think he’s more trustworthy than Bush. I say fuck our egos. Take the deal. If it stops people from dying, I’m for it.
By the way, Bush has already said that getting bin laden is “not a priority” for him, so as long as he doesn’t give a shit anyway, he might as well take the deal.
You lost me at “take the truce”. What Osama did was a criminal act, as there is really a very loose organization for his terror operation, there is no warranty whatsoever that he will stop any attack already planned. To make a deal, first he has to show that he has the power to order others around, like for example, order that all violent attacks to be stopped for a couple of weeks in Afghanistan.
Naivete – there is no deal. This is not about body count, even though I disagree with your numbers. This is about a just war. While the original reasons for going into Iraq were wrong (what WMD?) whether planned or not, we are now engaged with the real criminal, bin Laden. Whether Bush is trustworthy or not is not the issue. He will be gone in less than 3 years. The middle east terrorists will still be there, still killing people. We need to do everything we can stop them.
Even if Bin Laden could stop terrorism, he won’t. His truce is just time to regroup, rearm, recruit more fanatics. We should NOT give him this window.
This truce thing is ridiculous. Do you think OBL can just send out an email saying “Ok dudes, we have a truce, so everybody chill out”. I don’t think he even has that much “control” anymore anyway. Believe me, he doesn’t get a sitrep every morning listing every Islamic suicide bomber in the world working that day with targets, streets, etc.
As we know, basic terrorist doctrine calls for small cells with the ability to act independently. Any motivated person with access to explosives can strap on a vest, blow up some people, and proclaim “We, the Jihad Dudes From Hell just struck in the name of AQ”.
I don’t doubt AQ was somewhat organized over the years, especially with finance and training, but now I think they’re more of an amorphous “Boogeyman” with many “subcontractors” carrying on in their name, and with their own agendas. Again, I don’t think OBL has that kind of central control these days.
Another negative aspect of this BS “truce” offer is that some of his own people will think he is losing it and it’s time for new blood to step up and score some points, thereby increasing the risk of another big attack on the US mainland or Europe.
I can see some of his young guards talking: “Dude, the old fart is wimpin out man, and it’s time for us to step up and hit em hard. We will make a name for ourselves!”
There will always be Osama’s.
I say Osama bin Laden, George W Bush, steel cage match Thunderdome style. The loser dies in the ring, the winner gets to die painlessly.
Gringo_Miami What we did was foment overthrow after overthrow of governments in those nations leading to destabilization for 50 years. We trained the Mujahideen to fight the Soviets. We sold weapons to both Iran AND Iraq when they were at war with one another. We’ve armed the Saudi regime legitimizing one of the most brutal regimes in the world. We created Saddam Hussein only to turn on him later. Did you know that the CIA paid Saddam Hussein to kill the Prime Minister of Iraq in 1959, but he missed, he wounded him but didn’t kill him. The war on Terror was created so that all that Cold War infrastructure wouldn’t go to waste. The war on terror is a matter for international police, not militaries using it as a pretext to topple nations. I am sorry, but we have no moral highground in this issue, no matter how much you might want to justify your hate for the man that attacked us. Hate him all you like, but don’t try to justify it on moral grounds, because that’s just ludicrous. I think that by and large, the people that are spreading the propaganda here are worse than he is. Here is a man who was wealthy, lived in the lap of luxury and then went to fight for what he believed in. I respect and admire that. I don’t hate him for it. I am not saying he’s not on the other side, but there is no point in deluding myself into thinking that there is a right or wrong in this issue, that one side is better than the other, cuz it ain’t so. The Neocons are far more repugnant than Al Qaida.
Erek
I think of far more importance is that Osama picked the Panthers to beat the Seahawks 27-10. I guess he can’t be all bad.
Not all that much, though. Although, as Sam noted, many Iraqis are pretty disenchanted with al-Qaeda-type indiscriminately murderous suicide bombers (not that most Iraqis were ever significantly enchanted with them in the first place, as John noted), there are still a whole bunch of Iraqi insurgents. Most of the violence currently going on in Iraq has very little to do with foreign-sponsored fundamentalist millennarian jihad of the sort that al-Qaeda promotes, and a great deal to do with political/tribal/sectarian/criminal power struggles among the Iraqis themselves, as well as nationalist mistrust and resentment of a foreign occupation.
Supporting the Iraq war for the sake of being “engaged with the real criminal, bin Laden” is kind of like driving your car over your neighbor in order to crush a wasp on his leg. You may achieve your desired objective, but it’ll be pretty much overwhelmed by the damage you inflict in the process.
And I don’t see how anybody could seriously support initiating a bloody and terror-laden war on the flimsy grounds that it allows unpopular fundamentalist terrorists additional scope to make themselves even more unpopular. That’s an awfully small silver-lining-to-cloud ratio there, ISTM.
Erek… you are changing the debate again. What happened to the nations we were enslaving? Or the big bad aircraft carriers?? Please try to stick with one accusation at a time – every time you accuse America of something, I ask you for examples, and you switch the accusation - next up you will tell me that were rude to someone in the third world. Sigh
Kimstu - Please reread my posts. I would not have supported the initiation of the war on those grounds. Our original premise was WMD, which I went out of my way to mention. Bush and his “intelligence” community screwed that up royally. They convinced many that the WMD were real, and we needed to invade to stop Hussein from developing and using these weapons. I, like many others, went along with that. If you reread my OP in this thread, I mention that my support for this war waivered quite a bit. I had doubts once I found out that there were no weapons of mass destruction there (btw - I hate that phrase). One of the other reasons my support for this war became less enthusiastic, was that I believed it was diverting us from the fight against Al Qaeda and Bin Laden in particular.
It was only yesterday, when Bin Laden offered truce (and threatened more attacks) that I swung back the other way. If he is offering us a truce, we are on the right track. We are hurting him and his organization.
Many in this thread have stated that OBL can probably NOT command a truce any more. I tend to agree. One of the possible reasons for that is that his troops are losing confidence in him. Yet another reason to believe we are doing the right things.
On one level, this means that I am saying that Bush has unintentionally backed into a rationale for the war in Iraq. I have said in this thread, and other places, that I do NOT consider him to be very intelligent. Let me add that he is also a bit of a bumbler - and no, Cheney ain’t no genius either. Our fault really, all of us. We hired them. Twice. However, I can separate the war in Iraq from the intentions of our government enough to say that - were we there only for the WMD we should bring the troops home. Were we there to democratize the Middle East - we should bring the troops home. We are there now to engage Al Qaeda, and kill and capture as many of them as we can. This I am with 100%.