Text 20060, 74 rader
Skriven 2011-06-22 17:18:52 av Robert Bashe (2:2448/44)
  Kommentar till text 20053 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
Ärende: Who's the warmonger today? (was: What are we talking about now?)
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Michiel van der Vlist wrote to Robert Bashe on Wednesday June 22 2011 at 10:44:

MV>>> Afghanistan and Iraq? It started out as revenge for 9/11.

RB>> No, it started out to get al Quaida and Osama bin Laden.

MV> And why did the US want to "get" Bin Laden?

To "bring him to justice" for his crimes, to wit, murder of around 3,000 people
(not including the ones killed in, for example, the Kenyan bombings).
Organizing and knowingly funding murder is equivalent to the actual deed - I
hope you aren't going to try to dispute that, too. At any rate, they finally
got him, which is a tribute to their perseverence and doubtless has more than a
few of his buddies and fellow travellers doing some hard re-thinking about
their futures.

It's starting to look like that was even quite a watershed, when you see who al
Quaida chose as his "successor" - Aiman az-Zawahiri. Supposedly not well liked
in the organization since he doesn't have either the money or the diplomatic
skills of bin Laden. We'll see.

RB>> The pity was that al Quaida began the affair in Afghanistan by doing
RB>> their Taliban buddies a big favor - getting rid of _the_ potential
RB>> leader who might have had a good chance of uniting the country, Ahmad
RB>> Shah Massoud. He was doing pretty well against the Taliban when he
RB>> was

MV> Whatever. In hindsight, there is always something that the failure can
MV> be attribited to. But the war mongers never learn.

No, when you see that the Taliban still have a stranglehold on Afghanistan, you
have to agree to that. Can you still remember how they hanged their opponents
in the town square of Kabul? Can't imagine much nastier warmongering than that.

MV> And now after almost a decade of fighting the US has to admit that the
MV> war againt the Taliban can not be won with military means. This
MV> weekend it became public that they are negotiating.

MV> So why the hell didn't they do that in the first place!?

Hindsight is, as I've often remarked, much better than foresight. And the claim
that you "knew" in advance how everything was going to work out is something I
wouldn't even believe coming from a fortune teller with a first-class crystel
ball.

MV>>> Face it Bob, the Americans are not good at all in action, when you
MV>>> look at the success rate of those actions.

RB>> Face it, Michiel, Europeans are lousy diplomats if you judge their
RB>> success by the number of conflicts they've solved bloodlessly by mere
RB>> talking.

MV> Of course, diplomacy is not magic. Sometimes it fails. Some problems
MV> just can't be solved and have to solve themselves. But two out of
MV> three ain't bad I'd say.

Which two? Which three? ;-)

Anyway, my comment was just to try to show you how what you write looks to
those you rake over the coals. That kind of thing can go in two directions, you
know.

MV> But all in all, I think we are doing pretty well in Europe. A war
MV> between France and Germany is exteremely unlikely in the next fifty
MV> years.

Predictions that go more than maybe 5 years into the future are pretty tenuous
at best. The further you go in time, the less reliable any prediction becomes.
The best I could say for your prediction is "maybe".

Cheers, Bob

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