mmotyka@lsil.com wrote:

Let's see, as far as the Taliban and probably other extremists are concerned, all of Islam is in a life and death battle against non-believers, non-Muslims, namely a bunch of atheist Americans.

The U.S., OTOH, is taking great pains to emphasize that we are not at war with Islam but rather with a relatively small group of extremists.

Here's tidbit regarding the handling of Muslim terrorists: in 1911, General "Blackjack" Pershing was dealing with terrorists in the Philippines. He caught a handful of them, made them dig their own graves, tied them to stakes near the graves, and brought up a bunch of pigs. He told them that the pigs would be slaughtered along with the terrorists, and they'd be buried together, thus not only denying them the benefits of heaven but sending them straight to hell forever. He let one of the terrorists "escape" to spread the word. There was no problem with terrorists the rest of the time Pershing was there. The question is, why shouldn't we do something like that now? It's obvious a significant part of the Moslem world will never love the US, so we should make sure they fear us instead. (Wes Pruden mentioned this in his Washington Times column recently. I haven't found it elsewhere on the Web, but have seen it in print.) Re attacking Afghanistan, I don't even see why we're talking about going there in any kind of force, nor why there's talk of bombing it. We don't have a quarrel with the mass of Afghanis, but with the Taliban. Most of the Afghanis don't like the Taliban, either. We should be dropping care packages --- food, cheap radio receivers, some consumer goods, and guns. Drop so many packages that even if 3/4 of them are intercepted by "official" forces, there'll still be plenty of guns in the hands of the ordinary people. I did some back-of-the-envelope number crunching: Two MREs, a cheap radio, some knick-knacks, and a stamped single-shot .45 (like the Liberators we dropped on Occupied France during WWII) should cost around $20. Double that for delivery costs. (That latter is pure guess-work; I have no idea what an Air Force air-drop over hostile territory would cost.) We'd be able to drop 25,000,000 of these for a billion dollars. That's much less than the cost of even a small ground operation, and would be one per person in Afghanistan. And plenty of cheap but reliable pistols should let, say, a group of oppressed, beaten, and starving women kill a Taliban patrol and take their assault rifles. The consumer goods are just a finger in the eye for the reactionaries, by the way. They're trying to keep the country in the 12th century, so we should offend them by giving the people blue jeans, disposable razors, science fiction paperbacks, anything we can to drive the Taliban up the wall. -- Steve Furlong Computer Condottiere Have GNU, Will Travel 617-670-3793 "Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly while bad people will find a way around the laws." -- Plato