It has begun.

[theorgg]

President Bush hath begun bombing Afganistan. Their target is Taliban / Ladin. I hear that A Ladin is gonna get it with a missle, the representative from Missississippi has said... There is now a declaired Jihad(NOT V:tes) against the United States of America. If anyone here isn't on for a while... I'm assuming the worst...

This is in all probability the last I will mention of the war.

Here is my source.

 

[Ransac]

From what I read, Bin Laden survived the attacks. It's on Yahoo.com, if you want to check that.


It must have been a tough decision for Blair and Bush to make, but I understand it. After supplying sufficient evidence to the Taliban, they still did not hand over Bin Laden.


May God have Mercy on our souls if we are retaliated against.


Ransac, cpa trash man

 

[terzarima]

Or should you say "Peace be upon us"

Jihad's, or the concept scare me. It seems almost worse than war, that a whole religion could rise against the US. However, Jihad and muslim don't seem to go together, as I know what kind of religion it is.

I guess all I can say is, best of luck. Oh yeah, if you want to flee to Canada, I'll try and keep my door open.

 

[Goku]

Well, after watching TV all day...
There shouldn't be anything to worry about.

U.S. and Britain, two of the most powerful countries in the world, open attacks.
France pledges military support. They're decently powerful.
Germany (Ja!) pledges military support. They've been waiting to show might for what... more than 50 years now? And they're still strong.
Russia is on our side. They were our rival power for decades.
Japan's with us.
Even China is our ally.. not militarily, but Jiang said that he condemned the terrorist attacks, and said that he thought that the current Northern Alliance attacks on the Taliban/Ladin were fine, although "no massive civilian casualities should happen".

And furthermore, even though bin Laden said that the Northern Alliance is declaring "war on Islam", the Islamic community at large knows better.

As they said on the West Wing: "The Taliban and Muslim terrorists are to Islam as the KKK is to Christianity."

Well, there we go. All of the world powers, even the ones that the U.S. has been at odd with in the past century, are together, and all against the Taliban and bin Laden.

I'm pretty confident.

 

[Apollo]

The concept of Jihad doesn't particularly scare me this time, because the vast majority of Muslims don't consider this a Jihad. Were it actually the entire religion after us, it would be scary. In this case, though, it's only Osama and his loonies, who, while formidable, do not a Jihad make.

 

[MrXarvox]

Still, I'd remain wary of bioweapon attacks. It's not hard to envision a suicidal lunatic opening a can of anthrax in a big city.
We may be crushing them, but they still have the power to do a nasty little number on us...

 

[Gizmo]

I dont remember the coalition presenting sufficient evidence to the Taliban. I do remember Blair saying 'this isnt about Bin Laden, we will be attacking Afghanistan whether or not they hand him over'.

 

[Bob]

Japan's with us, eh? Then we can use an attack worse than any number of Nukes. Japan can introduce Pokemon to Afganistan.

Seriously, I don't think we should worry about the war since we have so many powerful allies, and as for bioweapons, Bin Laden has spies all over the U.S, and everyone is talking about Bioattacks. If we are prepared for it, chances are he won't use them. He wants to surprise us. he's not stupid.

And Goku forgot 2 very imporant allies: Pakistan, which neighbors Afganistan, and the Afgan rebels. The Afgan rebels started bombing government buildings, then the U.S and Britian joined them. If the Taliban is defeated, the Rebels will take over Afganistan, and hand over Bin Laden to us so we can torture him.

 

[Gizmo]

The Pakistani government has swung into line with the coalition, but is experiencing tremendous internal disorder at the moment because of doing so. There is widespread sympathy for the Taliban in Pakistan and they are walking a tightrope of internal difficulties.
As for the Afghan Rebels they are not so much allies as hoping to benefit from the attack on the Taliban. They dont have enough firepower to really offer much assistance, and the coalition don't really want them to be put into power anyway because the 'Northern Alliance' were about as popular and competent in government as the Taliban are, before they were ousted.

Its most likely that the old Shah will be put back in power.

 

[arhar]

I am very, very happy about it. Probably the best news in the last month. Finally, the hour of revenge is upon us!

 

[Zadok001]

There is no doubt in my mind that this first strike is exactly what I condemned when this whole matter started - An innaccurate, explosive strike. Innocents have died. Today, we have sunken to the level of those who struck out at us.

 

[arhar]

Have we?

We gave them a month to surrener Bin Satan. They didn't. We warned them, Blair warned them, they didn't listen. Now, as we finally attacked, we took great care not to harm innocent civilians, and attack only the Taliban. Plus, everybody forgets that we drop food on the regular Afghan people instead of bombs. I agree with Don Rumsfeld that this is THE ONLY way to fight terrorism..... GOD BLESS AMERICA!

 

[MrXarvox]

Eh. The Taliban are a bunch of scumbags anyway, and bin Laden's just as bad. They had it coming to them for a long time now. Of course, starting a war is never the right solution, it involves the deaths of innocents, but it's the way of the world that to oust a troop of murdering fanatics from their government, you have to become just a bit of a murdering fanatic yourself.
I don't like war, but then I don't like violent, oppressive regimes either.

Bob: bin Laden doesn't want so much to surprise us as to kill, frighten, and demoralize us. If he has spies everywhere then he probably knows that most people haven't gone off and bought gas masks. He's not stupid. He'll do what he can to induce terror. Wiping out a large portion of a megalopolis is not too difficult in today's world. And that would be a hell of a fright, wouldn't it?
Makes me thankful I live in a rural area... and afraid for some of my friends...

 

[EricBess]

Let's not jump to conclusions people. I didn't hear what Blair said, but what I did hear was that we were not attacking "Afghanastan" per se. We were attacking strategic military targets. I did hear that a couple of airports were wiped out, but not the landing strips. The Taliban government said that innocents were killed. I suspect that at an airport, that would probably be true.

But regardless, this was not a huge attack on the entire country. Several cities were attacked, but it wasn't just dropping a nuke on the city to wreck Afghanastan. Care was taken to take out the specific targets and not damage everything else. I'm guessing care was taken to avoid injuring civilians where possible. I have not seen anything yet to contradict this. I have no source on this except what the Secretary of State has said, but it would fit the overall strategy that we have seen coming out of the White House thus far. I'm not saying that a few of the attacks might not have gone astray, but just that care was taken to try to avoid that.

Don't forget that we also dropped quite a bit of humanitarian aide in the form of food and supplies.

The point is to keep hitting "expensive" targets and keep them so busy getting themselves back up to speed that they can never aford to mount an offensive attack again.

 

[DÛke]

...

I saw Bin Ladin's speech. I liked it. I agree with some of it too...the part where the U.S. will not see freedom until Palestine does too.

Hmmm...come to think of it, I don't hate Bin Ladin at all...

NOT at all...

 

[EricBess]

Bin Ladin is a disturbed individual with a vendetta. I don't hate him per se. He is following what he feels is a proper course from his perspective. However, he is going about it in a way that is wholy evil. I respect the man for his intelligence, but I am completely disgusted by what he does.

A few things to consider. I don't know exactly when his speach took place, but I suspect that it was prior to the terrorist attack in the first place. There is another speach made by some other leader (I don't remember the name) where bin Ladin is standing in the background. It is clear that bin Ladin had that tape recorded prior to the attack.

Part of it is a propoganda campaign. Prior to the attack, bin Ladin tried to predict how the US would react. He was hoping that retaliation would be swifter and more deadly. If it had been, his plea to the Muslim community might have hit home to demonstrate that the US is a big bully that just needs to be stopped. But who is worse, the person who reacts to a situation or the person that provokes the reaction? I would suggest that neither is completely pure.

Regardless, bin Ladin underestimated the US. The attacks were not retalitory irrational strikes. They were well planed after a few weeks to make sure that they were executed carefully. Bin Laden continued his plan, but I think he realizes that it wasn't as effective as he was hoping it would be.

You know who bin Ladin reminds me of? Khan!

Duke, I don't know what the full situation is in Palistine, so I won't comment other than to say that my understanding is that there is far more internal termoil than fear caused from outside sources.

 

[arhar]

Originally posted by DÛke
...

I saw Bin Ladin's speech. I liked it. I agree with some of it too...the part where the U.S. will not see freedom until Palestine does too.

Hmmm...come to think of it, I don't hate Bin Ladin at all...

NOT at all...

So... You don't hate him for killing 6000 of your countrymen?

 

[Zadok001]

Ericbess, you are of course correct. I certainly can't prove within the realm of probability that civilians were killed in this first wave of attacks, so I technically cannot yet condemn this military action in my own mind. However, I do feel there is a fair chance that innocents WERE killed, and if they were not, then I believe probability holds that they WILL. If either of those pans out to be true, I can't look at this as a strategic strike any more than I can look at the attack at the WTC as a strategic strike. Yes, it did what it was meant to do, and did it quite well. But it's doing Bad Things(tm) as well, so I can't find it within myself to support it.

As I've said all along - The first innocent blood that is shed at our hands marks the point at which we are no better than Bin Laden.

 

[Apollo]

I think EricBess put it very well. Bin Laden was hoping we'd come out with much greater retaliation, killing tons of innocents. But although we most likely have killed a small number of innocents, we've mostly hit very strategic targets. Plus, we've been airlifting the food in; it's possible that the food has helped the Afghn people as much or more than our bombs have hurt. Of course, I don't really have any idea about that... none of us can be exactly sure who's getting hit with what...

 

[Chaos Turtle]

Originally posted by arhar
So... You don't hate him for killing 6000 of your countrymen?

See... this is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about.

I hate the fact that it happened. I hate that there are people in the wolrd who would want to do such thing. But do I hate him?

I don't even know him. He's obviously both deranged and a charismatic leader, but that doesn't win hatred from me. It earns a desire to have him brought to justice, but it doesn't make me want to stick hot pins in his eyes or anything, which is what I might do to someone if I truly hated them.

Hatred is bad. It leads to holocausts and terrorism, among all sorts of other ills.