MonteZuma

That is debatable, but the "situation" in Iraq can be worse now than it was then. What will follow for the Iraqis? It might not be a step up in the end.

I don't know about you folks, but I had a good weekend. By the way, what is an ad hominum? Your so-called 'facts' proved nothing - except that the propaganda dished out by some western governments has fooled some of the people for some of the time. Fact: Iraq is a deadly dangerous -*BAD WORD*-hole at the moment and more Iraqis are being killed in post-invasion violence than westerners. The place is a mess.

Dr...I agree with the sentiment in your second paragraph. For the sake of Iraqis and everyone else, lets hope that you are right. My view though is that it is difficult or impossible to impose democracy on a country that isn't - for whatever reason - ready to embrace it. I think that it is even more difficult in the middle east than elsewhere. I don't really have time to address the third paragraph. We still need to find out what happened with the Australian emb!@#$%^&*y bombing. Some experts believe that bombing is unrelated to the Australian election. I'm undecided. Btw...A suggestion to Petrajs_Killer - Why don't you get your Iraqi friend to post something here - or type something up so that you can post it for him. Maybe we all need some enlightment from someone who lived under Saddam. Seriously. Anyway. Its Friday afternoon and I still got work to do. Have a good weekend people.

I stand by my statement. If your friend thinks that Iraq is now a bed of roses filled with lightness and goodness then I suggest that he go back and help rebuild the place. Freedom of expression and thought means nothing when your dad gets blown to pieces by a truck bomb. My view is that life for the average Iraqi sucks as much now as it ever did. If you disgree, show me some evidence that proves otherwise. As I said, lets hope things improve in Iraq soon. They could get worse.

Iraq wasn't a significant source of International terrorism before the invasion. Despite what you read about Hussein and his evil ways (and he was evil - no doubt about it), the average Iraqi was probably better off under Hussein than he/she is now. Lets hope things improve in Iraq soon. Iraq and terrorism are both intractable problems. The best option for the US and the world would have been to work with the UN. Bush blew it.

I think that everyone who posts here is intelligent. But even intelligent people get it wrong. Yes, but governments, including the US government, do make mistakes. I, along with over half of the citizens of the free world - and most of the rest - think that Bush and his government are stuffing up - big time. Maybe. But I disagree. Most of the free world supported Churchill. Most of the free world despises GWB. Jimmy Carter is respected by a lot of people in the US and outside. He did win the Nobel Peace Prize. He is one dude worth listening to. Despite their rhetoric, GWB and his staff will never win a peace prize. That is for certain.

Every wealthy nation should support poorer nations. In fact I think that this is one of the best and most cost-effective ways of fighting terrorism. I agreed with US action in Afghanistan. I agreed with action to liberate Kuwait. I agreed with the 30,000 troops that Clinton had in the region to keep Saddam Hussain in check. I don't agree with wholesale invasion of Iraq. I think the US has an important role to play militarily and politically in most parts of the world. Yes. Do you want me to paste a definition? If you really want to know my views, search through my last 10 or so posts. To add to what I've already said though, in relation to Russia and Afghanistan, Bin Laden always hated the US. He used your government to achieve his own ends.

Kerry won't win the war on terror either. But I think that he is more likely to sew the seeds of victory than Bush. Bush is too narrow-minded. This is a long term campaign. Republican supporters want a quick fix. There isn't one.

I agree. Al Qaida isn't a country, so your analogy is pointless. Nothing like this has happened before, so there is only so much we can learn from history. This is not WW3. In any case, I don't advocate appeasement at all. I, like most people, supported the war in Afghanistan. I want terrorism to be eliminated. I think that the actions of the current US government are hindering the successful execution of the "war" on terror. I agree. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. The important thing to note though, is that the 9/11 attacks still would have occured if there was an invasion of Iraq. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Bush's decisions are very much based on populist politics. Churchill was not often hated. Most Germans learned more from WW2 than you or I or GWB ever will. This has nothing to do with appeasment. This is about understanding the relationship between cause and effect. PS: Do you seriously think that you can compare Bush and Churchill? Get real.

If this were true you would still have 2 World Trade Center buildings in New York city. If you are American, and you want to help stamp out terrorism - Vote for Kerry.

Thanks for being the group's responsible adult. Who? Cultural imperialism is real. Anyone who has ever been outside of the US knows this. To explain away Bin Laden's actions with one word is naive. You can't reasonably justify terrorist acts. You can understand why they happen. Knowledge is power as they say. Oh the irony.

Russia never was a catholic country. Most religious Russians are Russian Orthodox and have been for 1,000 years. And most of the catholics in Russia are/were ethnic Lithuanians, Poles and Gennans. Russia was never a centre of catholocism - and never will be. Exactly. Why would they? They don't interfere with anyone. We do know what terrorists are motivated by. There is plenty of literature that explains this. They explain this themselves in videos and even on the Net. Try listening to what they say before they blow themselves up and you might start to understand where they are coming from. It is faulty to describe their motivation as either good or bad or stupid or smart. Obviously the people who flew the planes into the WTC and the Pentagon weren't stupid. They are probably very intelligent. Why do intelligent people do this stuff? Rest !@#$%^&*ured, these people are not killing themselves because they don't like grey suits. Aileron. Stop trying to turn this into a mathematical equation. Arabs and muslims are exactly the same as me and you. The only difference is that they have grown up in a different society and have been conditioned to believe different things. If we want to win the war on terror then we need to make sure that we (the west) aren't hated by the next generation of potential fundamentalists. You can't do that by killing innocents and telling people how to live their lives. If this war on terror was more strategic, and less innocent people got hurt, then we'd be a lot further advanced in this war than we are now. If I was an idealistic muslim kid in Iraq watching my neighbours and maybe even my parents getting killed by US 'smart' bombs I'd be pretty pissed. I might even want to retaliate when GI Joe comes walking down the street with a megaphone telling me how lucky I am to be free from tyranny. Is it really that hard to understand the motivation of these people?

And they generally do not have the capacity to intervene in muslim affairs. They do not dump their culture or beliefs on others. They aren't perceived as being decadant, exploitive or imperialistic. Basically they mind their own business.

I just can't let this post rest yet. The percentage of catholics in the countries you mention: USA - 28% Russia - <1% Spain - 94% Australia - 28% UK - 9% France - 77% Germany - 33% I think this blows your entire argument out of the water. Where is the corelation? Btw. About half of the world's Catholics live in South and Central America. Yet they don't seem to be targets of islamic terrorist attacks.

Aileron, You've lost it with this one. Totally. Can you provide some details about the truce offered by Bin Laden to the UK, Australia, France and Germany? There was a 'truce' offered to European countries that don't interfere in the affairs of muslim countries. I don't know why you think Australia and the UK are in that category. Really though. Everything you wrote in that post is ludicrous. <_<

Create a stable democratic government and ally in the heart of the middle east. Mabye you can agree that a non-saddam government whos friendly to the US in the middle east would be beneficial to stoping terrorist? I wish it were that easy. Saudi Arabia has stable government and is friendly to the US and yet in spawned Al Qaida and the September 11 attackers. Israel has a stable and democratic government in the middle east and yet it is a source of terrorism too.

At the moment yes, but the invasion forces included 2000 Australian troops, including 3 warships, 150 special forces troops, Orion surveilance and Hercules transport planes, and 14 F/A-18 Hornets. Italy did not contribute any forces to the invasion.

Great. GWB won a pissing contest against Saddam. Now what?

Their common ground is Islam and hatred for the west. Beyond that I agree. This is another reason why attacking Iraq does little to advance the war on terror. To fight terror we need to look elsewhere. I think that the Bali statistics show a different story. People linked to Al Qaida have been found with maps of an Australian nuclear reactor and footage of the Australian emb!@#$%^&*y in Singapore. Australia is on Al Qaida's hit list. Both Australia and GB have been mentioned as targets in recorded statements purported to be made by Bin Laden. In their eyes, everyone in the west is an oppressor. Especially those who support US policies. Are you serious? You think GB has done a whole lot of nothing in the war on terror? Aside from the huge military commitment that GB made, Tony Blair was in front of the cameras every days supporting GWB and the war. Australia made the third biggest military commitment. This was huge considering the size of Australia's economy and military. Both of those countries have laid it on the line more than any others - except the US. The fact that the US is still the primary target probably reflects the fact that the US is much more right wing and interventionist than GB and Australia. I don't think Al Qaida give a -*BAD WORD*- about the Baath party or Saddam. I think they just hate western involvement and intervention in muslim affairs.

Not really. The middle east has stagnated for thousands of years. In the middle east this mainly relates to the US's unbalanced support for Israel. Terrorists are evil and no country deserves to have a terrorist attack, but that does not mean that there are no explainable reasons why these things happen - and it doesn't mean that these attacks are unavoidable. Vile explained some of the reasons. In effect there has already been an attack on GB and Australia. This occured in Bali. This is a little indulgent, but the death toll in Bali: 88 Australians 23 Britons 9 Swedes 7 Americans 6 Germans 4 Dutch 3 Danes 3 New Zealanders 3 French 2 South Africans 2 Japanese 2 South Koreans 2 Brazillians 1 Singaporean 1 Taiwanese 1 Italian 1 Portuguese 1 Ecuadorian 1 Pole 1 Canadian 38 Indonesian There was some initial concern in Australia that this was an attack against Australians, but the bombers made it clear they they targetted the west in general. They hated the west. What we need to try to do is stop generating hate. What evidence do you have for that? Martyrdom isn't exactly a new phenomenon in the middle east. Where did you pull this from? BS. They know no such thing. If they had a mission statement I think it would say the exact opposite. Al Qaeda wants to establish a theocracy in the Middle East and they haven't given up. That means that I agree with some of what you said about these terrorists being right wing. But I think their quarrell with the west stems from self-serving western involvement and intervention in middle eastern affairs. Much of the lack of sensitivity towards different cultures arises from right wing policies. That is true whether we are talking about Islamo-fascists (nice word huh?) in the middle east or far right christian conservatives in the US. Both groups are well known for intolerance. We are better off without them. The irony of this whole thing is that Iraq was a relatively moderate society (unlike Saudi Arabia and Iran for example). In future, when the US finally pulls out of Iraq, Iraq may eventually become a theocracy. Bin Laden and Al Qaida might just win this battle yet.

Ummm because Iraq was the focus of over 10 years of media scrutiny before the invasion and nothing has been found to link Iraq with International terrorism. I think at most Saddam might have given some money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. If you think stopping that was worth tens of thousands of Iraqi lives and over a thousand US lives then maybe you have a point....pfft. No. And in any case the hijackers in the US came from mainly from Saudi Arabia - a US ally. Al Qaida was based in Afghanistan, but Bin Laden is from Saudi Arabia. What has Iraq got to do with it? Would you suggest an invasion of South Africa because Robert Mugabe (the President of Zimbabwe) is a tyrant? Can you show me a link between recent terror strikes and Iraq? There is no evidence that they were. You'd think that before your president commits billions of dollars and thousands of lives to a war he would get his facts straight first. Iraq was not a threat. Saudi Arabia is more of a threat than Iraq. We should do something about Saudi Arabia - and I don't mean invade it. Invading and destabilising a lame-duck country is asinine.

Its interesting and apt that you compare terrorism to the nazis and anti-semitism. The German people fell for whacky Nazi ideology because it offered a very simple explanation and solution to a complex problem. They used the jews and others as scape-goats to explain away every problem that faced German society. The war on terror offers a simple solution to a complex problem. People want to believe that the world will become better if we send some troops into Iraq. They don't want to believe that terrorism is intractable. That terrorism stems from deep-seated idealogical, cultural and religious differences, western decadence and cultural imperialism. They don't want to believe that to fight terrorism you actually need to be deal with those kinds of issues over a long perios. People want to think you can fix the problem remotely using cruise missiles and have the troops home by Christmas. Thousands of Iraqi kids are being mentally conditioned right now. Not for the better.

Iraq was not a hot-bed of terrorist activity. Now it is. Terrorism elsewhere continues unabated. To use your cancer analogy: Iraq was benign. Al Qaida is not. You need to attack the aggressive tumour in order to save the patient. You don't need to use aggressive interventions to fight a benign tumour. We've been fighting in Iraq when the real problem is elsewhere and unchecked. I'll ask the question again so that you can ignore it again: How has the invasion of Iraq been a success in the war on terror?

Why is voting to cut defense spending in the 1990s a bad thing? This was a time just after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The start of a new era of cooperation in Europe. And a time of stability and prosperity in Asia. It was also the time of the maturation of the information age. Cutbacks in defense spending were warranted. If the savings were chanelled into addressing the spectre of terrorism and the troubles in the middle east then 9/11 might not have happened. We live in an era when foreign intelligence is more valuable than military.

Heh, im sure to a frenchy its because America is evil encarnate. My answer is, I don't know. If you look at your response to Bacchus you will find part of the answer.