I’m so sick of hearing this: We trained Bin Laden to be a killer and now we shouldn’t be surprised that he’s killing us.
The illogic astounds me. Bin Laden was trained to defend his country from invaders. You know, like we trained Europeans in WWII or other allies in other cause that we as a nation felt were just. Just because you didn’t personally agree with the justness of the cause doesn’t justify saying we deserved this.
The logic is as silly as saying that we deserved the McVeigh bombing too since he’d been trained in military tactics by the U.S. govt.
No, there is no acceptable justification for the actions of bin Laden.
Yes, the fact that we put the gun in his hand had been repeated ad nauseum.
But this attack is a symptom of Cold War politics come home to roost. If any good can ever possibly come out of this, I hope that a part of it is that our clandestine services consider the consequences of their actions more carefully. There is precendent for the notion, after all. Remember our old ally, Iraq?
And the McVeigh analogy doesn’t really hold water. I’m not a military guy, but I don’t think he learned the particular tactics he employed to blow up the federal building in the service.
There is, in fact, a distinct degree of hypocrisy in bin Laden’s stance.
If America is the Great Satan, why did he willingly accept our tainted and corrupting money? Oh, to fight an even bigger evil known as Communism. And his gratitude for this? I think we all saw it earlier this month.
Catch the little maggot and let him reflect upon his deeds in solitary confinement for the rest of his entire life. Personally, I want him to die very slowly.
Your implication of course is that Bin Laden was given specific training in blowing up sky scrapers with jet airliners. I’m sure a little thought will convince you that the trainings of both monsters were equal in relevance to their crimes. I.e. none.
Nostradamus, you’re simply a fool if you believe that the U.S. was not involved in training (and being trained by) Europeans in the joint fighting of WWII. Simply a fool. Which I doubt, so I assume you must be laughing about something else.
Why did we give it to him? Bill H. said above, he was trained to defend his country from invaders. Really? That’s what we intended to train him for. Did we really know his adgenda even then? We were using him (we thought)to are own ends, to fight the Cold War. He was using us to his own ends all along. Maybe we should be more careful about who we get into bed with.
Irrelevent? Whether the people who hate us have a slingshot or a rifle- a rifle we gave them- is relevent.
What does any of this have to do with us deserving it?
Irrelevant as to blame, sure. But not irrelevant as to strategy. Both Australia and Pakistan are willing to assist in meeting current objectives. But surely the fact that cooperating, sharing intelligence, training and arming the armies of those two countries has a different likelihood of coming back and biting you should be a consideration in how you proceed.
My hilarity was due partly to the way you expressed yourself, and partly to the inference I drew, erroneously I’m sure, that Europeans were completely ignorant in matters of warfare until the Americans came along and showed us what to do.
I’ve seen so many movies in which the US won the war single-handed that I’ve obviously been brainwashed into thinking it’s true.
No. What people are saying is that using people like Bin Laden is foolhardy and downright dangerous-even if they don’t attack US, per se, we’re creating a monster.
As for OBL, he was not trained in the “art” of hijacking airplanes, or suicide bombing, by the United States. If there is any point to the argument you don’t like, it is that now we have to deal with the training we gave him. I said something along those lines. Soon we may be in a “shooting war” with him, and he knows some of our tactics. Point? None, really, except he may be able to kill more Americans as a result.
It’s possible that without training from the US, bin Laden et al may not have had the tools to rise to the position they did, but it does not necessarily follow. It’s a post hoc, ergo propter hoc error in logic. Bin Laden leads his followers by catering to an extreme fundamentalist Islamic belief system. He didn’t learn that from the US. As has been discussed ad nauseum, his guerilla training does not translate directly to the type of terrorism he now employs. He is intelligent (he has a civil engineering degree), he is radical, he volunteered for the mujahedeen, he founded the al Qaeda (whose original purpose was to channel fighters and funds to Afghani fighters) of his own volition. Unless someone can build a case on something other than ‘it happened after, so it was caused by’, I humbly submit that bin Laden is intelligent, driven, and disturbed enough to rise to his position with or without guerilla training from the US. Admitting this is pure speculation: he was exhilarated by the war against the Soviets, and when that conflict ended, he needed to fulfill his desire for conflict and the adulation he received as a result of his leadership. He needed a new common enemy to continue the existence he had built for himself.
*Mrs. Rabinowitz is sitting on the beach with her little grandson, who is playing in the
sand with a pail and shovel when a great tidal wave suddenly appears and sweeps him out to sea.
Mrs. Rabinowitz (shaking her fist at the sky): God, bring him back! Bring that little boy right back!
Another tidal wave appears and deposits the grandson on the beach, next to Mrs. Rabinowitz.
Mrs. Rabinowitz (after scrutinizing the child for a minute): God, he had a hat!*
When I was in first grade, we were trained to hide under our desks, in case of nuclear attack. That was even before the H-bomb. Over 35 years, the cold war was successfully led by Presidents from Truman to Reagan. Fortunately an evil form of totalitarian government has been mostly replaced with democracy, and nuclear war has been averted.
black455, you should be on your knees thanking all those who brought the cold war to a successful conclusion, not carping at them for what you think may have been a single tactical error.
Guin: Condoning what? Certainly not terrorism. You may have a point that the US has no business training rebels because someone has declared them the lesser of two evils; and you are welcome to it. But please provide a cite suggesting that these people are taught terror methods. Please supply a study indicating an individual who is trained by the US military in some way is more likely to become a petty warlord than someone with a differing military background. Your bin Laden and Pinochet examples are merely anecdotal. What about scores of persons trained by American military advisors who do not go on to cause problems?
Your change in tenses is odd. You’re arguing that by commiting an action in the past we therefore are currently condoning an action (past or present)? Could you be clearer as to why that is so? Because I don’t understand why that necessarily follows.
And it’s also unclear to me what your “it” refers to. The war against the Soviets in Afghanistan that was the reason we supported bin Laden and others like him over a decade ago? Certainly we condoned it then, and I suppose we’d probably still condone it now, though I’m not sure of the relevance. Or are you refering to current acts of terrorism? Again, I don’t see how that follows. Unless bin Laden’s current actions were reasonably forseeable during the time we were aiding him (and if it was, I’d like to see some evidence of it), we had no way of knowing then what he would be doing now.
George Washington was trained by the British (he served for a time under the British general Edward Braddock during the French and Indian War), does that then mean that the British Empire condoned his fight against them during the Revolution?