Web Site Posts Apparent Hostage Beheading

AP via Yahoo ^ | 09/20/2004 | AP

[radicalamericannationalist]

Same here. It's nice to disagree, kind of, and not end up being disagreeable.

[DC Bound]

Sorry for the long post, but it is relevant to the discussion.

How is your definition of our enemy different from the Bush Administration, which stated we will destroy terrorists and the regimes that support them?

From Podhoretz at Commentary:

"If the first of the four pillars on which the Bush Doctrine stood was a new moral attitude, the second was an equally dramatic shift in the conception of terrorism as it had come to be defined in standard academic and intellectual discourse.

Under this new understanding—confirmed over and over again by the fact that most of the terrorists about whom we were learning came from prosperous families—terrorism was no longer considered a product of economic factors. The "swamps" in which this murderous plague bred were swamps not of poverty and hunger but of political oppression. It was only by "draining" them, through a strategy of "regime change," that we would be making ourselves safe from the threat of terrorism and simultaneously giving the peoples of "the entire Islamic world" the freedoms "they want and deserve."

In the new understanding, furthermore, terrorists, with rare exceptions, were not individual psychotics acting on their own but agents of organizations that depended on the sponsorship of various governments. Our aim, therefore, could not be merely to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and wipe out the al Qaeda terrorists under his direct leadership. Bush vowed that we would also uproot and destroy the entire network of interconnected terrorist organizations and cells "with global reach" that existed in as many as 50 or 60 countries. No longer would we treat the members of these groups as criminals to be arrested by the police, read their Miranda rights, and brought to trial. From now on, they were to be regarded as the irregular troops of a military alliance at war with the United States, and indeed the civilized world as a whole.

Not that this analysis of terrorism had exactly been a secret. The State Department itself had a list of seven state sponsors of terrorism (all but two of which, Cuba and North Korea, were predominantly Muslim), and it regularly issued reports on terrorist incidents throughout the world. But aside from such things as the lobbing of a cruise missile or two, diplomatic and/or economic sanctions that were inconsistently and even perfunctorily enforced, and a number of covert operations, the law-enforcement approach still prevailed.

September 11 changed much—if not yet all—of that; still in use were atavistic phrases like "bringing the terrorists to justice." But no one could any longer dream that the American answer to what had been done to us in New York and Washington would begin with an FBI investigation and end with a series of ordinary criminal trials. War had been declared on the United States, and to war we were going to go.

But against whom? Since it was certain that Osama bin Laden had masterminded September 11, and since he and the top leadership of al Qaeda were holed up in Afghanistan, the first target, and thus the first testing ground of this second pillar of the Bush Doctrine, chose itself."

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=11802019_1

[sixmil]

I don't believe you are advocating killing for the sake of killing. So I'll assume that any collateral deaths caused by using the nuclear option are deaths you would prefer to avoid. If that is the case, and I admit I'm making an assumption from your post, if there are weapons that would achieve the same destruction on our enemy without the collateral damage, would you prefer to use those weapons first?

I don't advocate killing for the purpose of killing. That is entirely different from killing for the purpose of saving our soldiers' lives as we did with Germany and Japan.

I don't think you can avoid collateral damage. Maybe to some extent, but never completely. Assuming you could completely avoid collateral damage, how are you going to find the ones you want to target? We've got a mad man running around Iraq cutting people's heads off, and nobody knows where he is. How are you going to target him?

[DC Bound]

There is an excellent article posted about Zarquawi that has significantly got me wondering. At some point, you are right, your battleground becomes sufficiently saturated with enemy that the only way to deal effectively with the situation is to destroy everything. The article (if I was more competent with HTML I would link it) states that many large areas of Falluja have been abandoned by the locals and are used as headquarters for Zarquawi's planners. Sounds as if any good guys have already cleared out. If it was my decision and I could reasonably confirm the article I cited above, I'd take it to a higher level.

[JohnathanRGalt]

"Why the hell do people like you post the same crap time after time after time?"

OK, well any suggestions on how to stop these animals from doing this.

I suggest that you help http://haganah.org.il/haganah/index.html Online-Haganah is having a fund drive right now, but if you can't afford money to send them (PayPal accepted) please spend some of your own time, only a few minutes a day writing to the ISPs in America and Britain hosting Islamist terror.

[JohnathanRGalt]

Why does AP continue to refer to these brutal murderers as "militants?"

Have you also noticed that the media never gives a URL to the website. What is the media hiding from the public?

[Fast5]

Islam? You said Islam?
You just trying to throw me off.
All then thar Politick Folks want to play the PC game when it is good for them and then they all put on the ole used pair of Flip-Flops and off they go again.
What if, what if, either there was such a low turn out for the vote, that there had to be a re-vote OR Mr. Nader ended up with the majority?