Associated Press has pre-issued a Thanksgiving Day photo of a former US soldier who lost a leg, participating in a photo op at a military base. Secdef and CJCS issued pre-holiday thanks yesterday to the families of the military dead and to the wounded and maimed in hospitals and on photo op tours. Today Secdef was on Laura Ingraham gushing (slobber not blood) about the AmericaSupportsYou.mil website where red-blooded Americans can participate in thanksgiving the Iraq bloodletting, praising the headless and limbless and scared shitless and McVeigh-mad-dogs yearning-to-frag-backhome-warfighters. AP has nearly stopped showing valorous warriors in combat in Iraq, now its mostly photos of funerals and the dead in cheerful high school pictures and dress-uniformed headshots, oops, head shots are no, no's, except for the hardbitten would-be warriors here sitting fat and happy before the keyboard tapping for more killing, right James, civil war over there is hunky dory, but please not an RPG invading your computer bubble, an IED making your kids into rag dolls. Overseas wars are delightful movie-land fun from over here, Secdef croons -- gobble, gobble, Sergeant York called for the Secdef's curious-head pop-up. Seen the Norwegian site that calls for Bush's head shot? Two URLs, the last vivid: http://www.killhim.nu/ http://killhimwith.bazooka.at/once/

-- James A Donald wrote...

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And the problem with a civil war in Iraq is?

Tyler Durden

And the answer is: 9/11 sucked.

Oh wait, I guess I have to explain that. After the Soviets were pushed out of Afghanistan the place became a veritable breeding ground for all sorts of virulent strains of Islam, warlords, and so on.

Nothing wrong with warlords - right now they are doing a fine job of keeping the Taliban down. What made it a breeding ground for terrorism was not civil war, but diminuition of civil war. The problem was that the Taliban was damn near victorious. If the US government had maintained the relationship with our former anti communist allies, and kept on sending them arms, we never would have had 9/11 The trouble was that the government abandoned our allies. We should have sent them enough aid to sustain permanent major civil war against the Taliban. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG PKHY56Lv+tILn2Qq0fJACuoHr5UrnHsCHuFRofC7 4B3ZCczFe/KNkguYoDENJrgFm5KZ6pJTV/sIRh7wY

-- James A Donald wrote...

...

What made [Afghanistan] a breeding ground for terrorism was not civil war, but diminuition of civil war. The problem was that the Taliban was damn near victorious. If the US government had maintained the relationship with our former anti communist allies, and kept on sending them arms, we never would have had 9/11

Tyler Durden

Well, that's not particularly convincing. First of all, even during the Taliban's reign there were plenty of warlords that ran some regions of Afghanistan.

I seem to recall you lot claiming that the Taliban had successfully restored order - (you see the Taliban being able to massacre civilians unoppose as order) There was some truth in that claim. They controlled 95%. Had their been less truth, the Taliban would have had less ability to make trouble.

More to the point is that a long term period of chaos and turbulence causes the locals to be willing to open the door to the like of the Taliban, as long as they offer some kind of peace.

So we should therefore make sure they cannot offer some kind of peace. In Iraq, the Pentagon cannot supply peace. Why then should we allow those who wish to destroy us provide peace? If we cannot have peace, no one should.

The period between Soviet withdrawal and the Taliban was uglier than practically anything imaginable...one batch of warlords would take over, killing the men loyal to the previous batch and raping the women,

Nonsense. The ugly thing about the period before Taliban rule was that the Taliban, or people of much the same ideology, would persistently destroy murder and rape in order to get people to submit to their rule. When opposition largely collapsed, their massacres did not cease, though their rapes became more discrete. Instead, they decided to expand their terror onto a wider stage. The war was not warlord vs warlord, it was radical Islamists vs the rest, the rest being warlords and conservative Islamists. The radical Islamists won, but victory did not appease their appetite for terror.

and then another batch would take over and do the same thing.

All the big crimes were committed by the Taliban or their ally Hekmatyar. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG iMxmau6gQqD0z0pAMUXMXDaFhYeKeIIMk+RxXM7G 4oThdqbZEnQ5o4UXBwjhmlFI92anV7zx78zQop+f4

On Thu, 25 Nov 2004, Tyler Durden wrote:

When the Taliban came in to power, they seemed to offer some stability, albeit at a price. And I'd bet a lot of people in the shoes of the Afghanis would have been willing to pay that price.

An afghani is a unit of currency, worth much less than a penny. The people who live there are Afghans or Afghanistanis or just Afs. I know it's a trivial point, but for those of us who have actually spent some time there -- and to the Afghans, of course -- it grates. -- Jim Dixon jdd@dixons.org tel +44 117 982 0786 mobile +44 797 373 7881 http://jxcl.sourceforge.net Java unit test coverage http://xlattice.sourceforge.net p2p communications infrastructure