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However, if you back up a couple of steps, you can see that the Bin Ladin situation is an outcrop of the first war in Iraq. Bin Ladin's excuse for hating the US is that the infidels have troops in the Saudi territories. That is where this really starts.
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I think that's as niave an assumption as the idea that you can turn Iraq into a democracy and use it as a base for further operations. You can no more simplify the matter down to that than you can assume that all Muslims are Islamic fundamentalists. Even you refer to the infidel intrusion into Saudi as an excuse. If not for that, it would be something else.
What the Islamic fundamentalists want is to turn the Islamic world into Afghanistan. Even the mullahs in Iran fear these folks. Morocco has had to scale back attempts to democratize due to attacks from Islamic fundamentalists.
The clash between the West and Islamic fundamentalists is inevitable. How we fight it, and where we fight it, is the question that needs to be debated.
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As for Spain, well, without the war in Iraq, I doubt that the bombings would not have occured in the manner they did.
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At it's widest point, the Straits of Gibraltar that separate Spain from Morocco is 1/3 the distance between Florida and Cuba. Spain has economic interests in Morocco that would have lead to the conflict involving them regardless of their participation in the Iraqi diversion. I have no doubt that this was part of the muddle-headed thinking of the Spanish government when it got involved in the war - the American right are not the only people with their head up their ass.
Again, the war in Iraq was merely a pretext to carry out attacks that would have taken place anyway - if not now, then soon enough.
Trust me, I am not known for taking an opportunity to blame Bush for something (I think Mike AI would serve as a reference) - but the war with Islamic fundamentalists is not his fault. I don't dispute that the war in Iraq is an unnecessary diversion that has set the real war back considerably, but a discussion based on defending as factual the pathetic excuses offered by the terrorists as justification for their acts does not contribute to the debate over where/whom/when to fight the battles that will have to be fought.
Last edited by PornoDoggy at Apr 2 2004, 02:31 PM