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I would rather be considered a 'hopeless idealist' than someone who approves of torture and murder based on a utilitarian view of saving lives.
Intentionally inflicting pain on someone is an act of torture. Intentionally killing someone is an act of murder.
Intentionally inflicting pain on someone (e.g., itm) to learn who is planning to kill you is an act of torture that you perpetrate to save your life. Intentionally inflicting pain is a means. Saving your life is an end. I believe this end justifies this means.
Intentionally inflicting pain on persons (e.g., itm) to learn who is planning to kill civilians is an act of torture that you perpetrate to save civilian lives. Intentionally inflicting pain is a means. Saving civilian lives is an end. I believe this end justifies this means.
Intentionally killing a person (e.g., itm) threatening to kill you is an act of murder that you perpetrate to save your life. Intentionally killing is a means. Saving your life is an end. I believe this end justifies this means.
Intentionally killing persons (e.g., itm) threatening to kill civilians is an act of murder that you perpetrate to save civilian lives. Intentionally killing is a means. Saving civilian lives is an end. I believe this end justifies this means.
You've completely missed the point of the 'kill a child to save a village' example, which is a classic tool used for showing that the ends do not in fact justify the means;
This classic tool, as you call it, is an invalid tool for demonstrating that the ends do not justify the means, because it infact is a valid tool for demonstrating that the means of murdering some (e.g., itm) to achieve the ends of saving the lives of many, is actually a case demonstrating an end that does justify a means.
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This is the attitude displayed by many tyrants and purveyors of human misery throughout history.
"The attitude displayed by many tyrants and purveyors of human misery throughout history" is that ends regarding removal of them do not ever justify means for removing them, in order to cow those tyrannized and made miserable into not doing what is necessary to free themselves from the power exerted by "tyrants and purveyors of human misery throughout history."
comments added in the following quote by ican
Quote:The ends justify the means
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"The ends justify the means" is a phrase encompassing two beliefs:
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The premise is that Morally wrong actions are sometimes necessary to achieve morally right outcomes
No! The actual premise is that lesser morally wrong actions are sometimes necessary to achieve greater morally right outcomes. This premise as I just reworded it, assumes that all morally wrong means are not equally morally wrong, and that all morally right ends are not equally morally right. In other words, what morally rights one sacrifices is not absolutely always more valuable than any morally right one can gain by such sacrifice.
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Most religions do not endorse the utilitarian philosophy. For example, the golden rule, held by Jesus, and the Hindu doctrine of karma would both discourage actions based on a purely utilitarian justification. The rationale behind this is the doctrine that all will come to light (all will be known, discovered) in the end and that good begets good, and also the doctrine stating that this life on earth is not the primary life.
The Old Testament, According to the Masoretic Text, Exodus, 20.1, says: "And God spoke all these words, saying: I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage."
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20.13, says: "Thou shall not murder."
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The Old Testament, According to the Masoretic Text, Exodus, 21.1, says: "Now these are the ordinances which thou shall set before them."
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21.12, says: "He that smiteth a man so that he dieth, shall surely be put to death."
To intentionally kill is to murder. So I interpret this last quote to mean: He that murders a man, shall be murdered.
The concept that murder of innocents is a neccessary thing in order to preserve order, that torture is neccessary in order to preserve order, is a sure way to no longer have order at all. It is the same justification presented by every enemy of America; that the things they do are neccessary in the name of 'state security.' ... That's not what America is about, torturing and murdering.
Of course that is not what America is about. America is about securing the liberty of its civilians.
emphasis added in the following quotes by ican
Quote:The Declaration of Independence
(Adopted in Congress 4 July 1776)
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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
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Quote:The Constitution of the United States of America
Effective as of March 4, 1789
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
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Our greatest tool for fighting terror isn't our military force, but our culture. American culture has proven amazingly effective in transforming thoughts and opinions all over the world, societies, peoples. By bending the rules which supposedly make us special - by becoming more like those countries who we have disdained over the years - we throw away our greatest tool for changing the world. And it is a nameless and shapeless fear we toss it away for, one which realistically will never end (terrorism will never end, no matter what we do, like the war on drugs really). In the long run, we are doing far, far more damage to our cause by engaging in murder and torture than we are helping our cause by finding immediate intel (which is extremely suspect anyways).
Our culture is our greatest and most necessary tool for fighting terror, but it is not our ownly great and necessary tool for fighting terror. Thankfully, Americans, at least many Americans, are willing to secure their liberty by torturing and murdering those who would deprive us of our liberty.
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Cycloptichorn
Condi and the isolationists
By Patrick Buchanan
06/16/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- To buttress crumbling support for his interventionist policy, President Bush played his ace of trumps, sending his most popular champion, Condi Rice, to the Southern Baptist Convention.
If seven standing ovations and 20,000 Christians bursting forth into a spontaneous signing of "God Bless America" at the close is any measure, the secretary succeeded splendidly in her speech.
Yet in carrying forward the faux-Churchillian, stand-up-to-the-isolationists theme of the State of the Union, Condi employed a device readily recognizable to any student of rhetoric.
She presented the good Baptist folks with the false alternative.
America has a choice, she said: to stand by a courageous president, or to conduct a cowardly retreat from the challenges of our time:
"Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the choice before our country, before us as Americans. Will we lead in the world, or will we withdraw? Will we rise to the challenges of our time, or will we shrink from them?"
Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler seems to have been well-briefed on whom Condi was targeting.
"Rice did not specifically refer to isolationists, but her inference was clear. ...
"President Bush first raised concerns about isolationism in his State of the Union Address this year. Since then, the outrage over the potential sale of U.S. port operations to a Dubai-based company and the drive to build a wall along the border with Mexico have added to the worries of administration officials. They fear that it could result in demands even from the president's strongest traditional supporters to pull out troops from Iraq and Afghanistan."
Why, one wonders, do President Bush and Rice not tell us who these dreaded isolationists are and how they could conceivably seduce the Southern Baptists into questioning Bush policy?
The truth: If Southern Baptists are peeling off from the Bush coalition for moral imperialism and democracy crusades, the reason may not be that they wish to flee the world, but that they see the Bush-Rice policy as failing. At a great cost in blood and treasure, we seem to be reaping a rising harvest of hatred.
The same day the report on Rice's speech appeared in the Post, the Washington Times reported on a remarkable rise of anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world. In a wide-ranging survey of opinion on Iran's nuclear program and Islamic attitudes toward the United States, a group called Terror Free Tomorrow, which boasts John McCain among others on its board, reported that:
Seven in 10 Pakistanis favor Iran's acquiring nuclear weapons.
Two of three Pakistanis have a negative opinion of the United States, a figure that rises to 71 percent among citizens of NATO ally Turkey and an astonishing 89 percent in Saudi Arabia.
Two-thirds of all Saudis, Turks and Pakistanis believe those mocking cartoons of Muhammad printed in the Danish newspaper and reprinted across Europe reflect Western hostility toward their faith.
Did isolationists create such animosity toward America among our closest allies in the Muslim world? How? And who are they?
Answer: No such beasts exist. The people who have produced such results for America are the decision-makers themselves - Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice - and their advisers, the neoconservatives.
To understand who is truly responsible for a situation where a U.S. secretary of state has to go before a convention of religious conservatives to try to hold their support for a president they put in office, Rice might ask herself some questions.
Is it the isolationists who cannot end a column or commentary without howling for new pre-emptive strikes on "Islamofascists"? Was it isolationists who reveled in those Danish cartoons, reprinting them and declaring them to be a fine expression of Western values?
Was it isolationists who sent an army storming into Baghdad in search of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist, resulting in tens of thousands of Iraqi army and civilian dead, three bloody years of "collateral damage" to Iraqi women and children, and the inevitable horrors of guerrilla war, such as Abu Ghraib and Haditha?
Is it isolationists who are supporting Israel's strangulation of aid-dependent Palestinians, the purpose of which was wittily described by Sharon sidekick Dov Weisglass: "The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger"?
Presumably, the hungry Palestinian children are to pressure Hamas to recognize Israel. One wonders. Do the good Christian folks gathered at Greensboro, N.C., think what we are doing to these people is a godly thing to do?
In Afghanistan, the Taliban are making a comeback. In Iraq, the new democratic government Bush celebrated in his surprise visit is considering amnesty for Sunni insurgents who only killed Americans.
Why did Condi rip into isolationism at the Baptist convention?
Because it is a less daunting task than defending the fruits of a foolish interventionism that are now lying right in front of us.
© 2006 Creators Syndicate Inc.
We in this age are witnesses to the loss of our ideals which was what made America so special in the past. It's ugly and its frustrating because there is not a thing we can do about it when torture is even debated as an acceptable means to obtaining information much less accepted by a large number of Americans. Everything is being excused on the so called grounds of fighting terrorism either directly or indirectly, its disgusting.
Quote:Condi and the isolationists
By Patrick Buchanan
06/16/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- To buttress crumbling support for his interventionist policy
...
defending the fruits of a foolish interventionism that are now lying right in front of us.
© 2006 Creators Syndicate Inc.
For the sake of humanity we must not fail in Iraq and Afghanistan to exterminate the itm there.
Quote:For the sake of humanity we must not fail in Iraq and Afghanistan to exterminate the itm there.
I think your being way overdramatic here. Regardless of the outcome in either or both countries humanity and America will prevail.
Two U.S. Soldiers Missing After Checkpoint Attack
BAGHDAD, June 17 -- U.S. and Iraqi forces conducted a sweeping hunt Saturday for two American soldiers missing after a clash with insurgents in Yusufiyah, south of Baghdad, raiding houses, scanning the scene from aircraft and deploying divers to search waterways.
One American soldier was killed in the incident, in which insurgents attacked a vehicle checkpoint in the restive Sunni Arab town just before 8 p.m. Friday. The names of the dead and missing soldiers are being withheld until their families can be notified, the military said.
"We are using all available assets, coalition and Iraqi -- ground, air and water -- to locate and determine the duty status of our soldiers," Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, a U.S. military spokesman, said in a televised statement Saturday.
Before this week, only one U.S. soldier missing in Iraq remained unaccounted for. Sgt. Keith "Matt" Maupin was abducted April 9, 2004, after his convoy was attacked on Baghdad's airport road. Insurgents later released a video that purported to show Maupin being shot dead, but the military deemed it inconclusive.
Word of the missing troops came as insurgents in and around Baghdad thwarted a heavy police and army presence and carried out six attacks that killed at least 35 people, most of them Iraqi police and soldiers. In recent days, the capital has seen increased numbers of checkpoints, patrols and raids as part of a new security initiative from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government.
The deadliest attack Saturday came in the northern neighborhood of Zayouna, home to many former officers in Saddam Hussein's army, where a suicide car bomber struck a joint Iraqi police and army checkpoint, killing 12 members of the security forces and wounding 22, according to Brig. Gen. Arkan Yahiya of Iraq's Interior Ministry.
Seven other members of Iraq's security forces were killed when a car bomb blasted a checkpoint near Iraq's National Theater in the southern neighborhood of Karrada, police officials said. A car bomb at a checkpoint in Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad, also killed seven.
In the Shiite-majority neighborhood of Kadhimiyah, northwest of downtown, three nearly simultaneous explosions rocked a crowded market early Saturday morning, killing a father and son and wounding 15 others, according to Ahmad Hussein, a doctor at nearby Kadhimiyah Hospital. The blast took place near a prominent Shiite shrine frequented by pilgrims.
"I came from Najaf to visit the shrine, and after I finished the visit I was drinking water with my wife when the explosion took place," said Natiq Gati, 55, who was badly burned from head to toe. "I felt the heat on my back."
"What security plan are they talking about?" said Hussein Kadhum, 21, who was visiting the shrine Saturday. "The whole area is cordoned and the police and army are everywhere and are searching everybody. So who can bring explosives inside this area unless there are people with the security forces cooperating with him?"
The Mujaheddin al-Shura Council, an umbrella organization of insurgent groups that includes al-Qaeda in Iraq, also derided Maliki's security initiative as a "media show" and promised more attacks in the coming days, in a statement posted on a Web site used by insurgents.
In Yusufiyah, a U.S. military statement said a quick reaction force had arrived at the scene within 15 minutes of the clash that led to the disappearance of the two soldiers. Police and soldiers manning nearby checkpoints were ordered to stop civilian traffic and establish a perimeter around a concentrated search area. Helicopters, airplanes and unmanned drones were dispatched to provide surveillance, the military said.
In the heart of the violence-plagued Sunni Arab suburbs south of Baghdad, Yusufiyah has seen a series of military operations in recent months, including one in April in which former al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- killed this month by a U.S. airstrike -- was believed to have narrowly escaped.
As of late Saturday, U.S. and Iraqi forces had cordoned much of the town, and residents reported raids on houses and other buildings near the intersection of a canal and the Euphrates River where the attack took place. Residents said cellphone networks had been scrambled near the site of the attack and that soldiers were scrutinizing women wearing traditional head scarves to verify that they were not men.
"Make no mistake," Caldwell said. "We never stop looking for our service members until their status is definitively determined, and we will continue to pray for their safe return."
From the Embassy, a Grim Report
From the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, a stark compendium of its local employees' daily hardships and pressing fears
Sunday, June 18, 2006; Page B01
Hours before President Bush left on a surprise trip last Monday to the Green Zone in Baghdad for an upbeat assessment of the situation there, the U.S. Embassy in Iraq painted a starkly different portrait of increasing danger and hardship faced by its Iraqi employees. This cable, marked "sensitive" and obtained by The Washington Post, outlines in spare prose the daily-worsening conditions for those who live outside the heavily guarded international zone: harassment, threats and the employees' constant fears that their neighbors will discover they work for the U.S. government.
xingu wrote:Quote:For the sake of humanity we must not fail in Iraq and Afghanistan to exterminate the itm there.
I think your being way overdramatic here. Regardless of the outcome in either or both countries humanity and America will prevail.
I think you're being way underdramatic here. We are faced with an enemy, the itm, who have proclaimed their doctrine to be death or slavery of all those who do not share their belief system. The itm have demonstrated their ability, absent strong and effective resistance, to continually recruit youths from all over the world to mass murder civilians and those youths themselves in support of the itm's quest for power.
The longer we delay the extermination of the itm, the more expensive in life and treasure it will be to exterminate the itm..
We are faced with an enemy, the itm, who have proclaimed their doctrine to be death or slavery of all those who do not share their belief system.
When US turned a blind eye to poison gas
America knew Baghdad was using chemical weapons against the Kurds in 1988. So why, asks Dilip Hiro , has it taken 14 years to muster its outrage?
Sunday September 1, 2002
The Observer
When it comes to demonising Saddam Hussein, nothing captures the popular imagination in America better than the statement that 'he gassed his own people'. This is an allusion to the deployment of chemical weapons by Iraq's military in the Iraqi Kurdistan town of Halabja in March 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war, and then in the territory administered by the Tehran-backed Kurdish rebels after the ceasefire five months later.
As Iraq's use of poison gases in war and in peace was public knowledge, the question arises: what did the United States administration do about it then? Absolutely nothing. Indeed, so powerful was the grip of the pro-Baghdad lobby on the administration of Republican President Ronald Reagan that it got the White House to foil the Senate's attempt to penalise Iraq for its violation of the Geneva Protocol on Chemical Weapons to which it was a signatory. This made Saddam believe that the US was his firm ally - a deduction that paved the way for his brutal invasion and occupation of Kuwait and the 1991 Gulf war, the outcomes of which have not yet fully played themselves out.
Between October 1983 and the autumn of 1988, Baghdad deployed 100,000 munitions, containing mainly mustard gas, which produces blisters on the skin and inside the lungs, and nerve gas, which damages the nervous system, but also cyanide gas, which kills instantly. From initially using these lethal agents in extremis to repulse Iran's offensives, the Iraqis proceeded to use them as a key factor in their assaults in the spring and summer of 1988 to regain their lost territories, including the strategic Fao peninsula.
That the Pentagon had first-hand knowledge of Iraq's use of chemical agents during these offensives was confirmed by the New York Times two weeks ago. 'After the Iraqi army, with American planning assistance, retook the Fao peninsula, a Defense Intelligence Agency officer, Lt Col Rick Francona, now retired, was sent to tour the battlefield with Iraqi officers,' wrote Patrick Tyler of the Times. 'Francona saw zones marked off for chemical contamination, and containers for the drug atropine scattered around, indicating that Iraqi soldiers had taken injections to protect themselves from the effects of gas that might blow back over their positions.'
In 1986, it was with the aim of recapturing the Fao peninsula, taken by the Iranians in February, that Saddam's military used chemical agents so extensively that the UN Security Council stopped accepting its routine denials. Following an examination of 700 Iranian casualties, UN experts concluded that Baghdad had deployed mustard and nerve gases many times. Instead of condemning Baghdad for this, the Security Council, dominated by Washington and Moscow, both pro-Iraq, coupled its condemnation of Baghdad with its disapproval of 'the prolongation of the war' by Tehran for refusing a truce until the council had named Iraq the aggressor.
Despite its repeated reiteration of neutrality, the US had all along been pro-Baghdad. It lost no time in supplying Iraq with intelligence collected by the Saudi-owned but Pentagon-operated Airborne Warning and Control Systems (Awacs) plying in the region. Once Iraq and the US had resumed diplomatic links after the re-election of Reagan as President in November 1984, the military cooperation blossomed.
Starting in July 1986, aided by the Pentagon, which clandestinely seconded its air force officers to work with their Iraqi counterparts, Saddam's air force greatly improved its targeting accuracy, striking relentlessly the enemy's power plants, factories and bridges, and extending the range of its strikes to Iran's oil terminals in the lower Gulf. Under the rubric of escorting Kuwaiti oil tankers, the US built up an armada in the Gulf, which clashed with the small, under-equipped Iranian navy and sank two Iranian offshore oil platforms in the lower Gulf in retaliation for Iran's missile attack on an American-flagged supertanker docked in Kuwaiti waters.
Against this background, Iraq started hitting Tehran with its upgraded Scud ground-to-ground missiles in late February 1988. To retake Halabja from Iran and its Kurdish allies, who had captured it in March, Iraq's air force attacked it with poison gas bombs. The objective was to take out the occupying Iranian troops (who had by then left the town); instead, the assault killed 3,200 to 5,000 civilians. The images of men, woman and children, frozen in instant death, relayed by the Iranian media, shocked the world. Yet no condemnation came from Washington. It was only when, following the ceasefire with Iran in August, Saddam made widespread use of chemical agents to recapture 4,000 square miles controlled by the Kurdish insurgents that the Security Council decided to dispatch a team to find out if Baghdad had resorted to chemical arms. Saddam refused to cooperate.
But instead of pressuring him to reverse his stand, or face a ban on the sale of American military equipment and advanced technology to Iraq by the revival of the Senate's bill, US Secretary of State George Shultz chose to say only that interviews with the Kurdish refugees in Turkey and 'other sources' (which remained obscure) pointed towards Iraqi use of chemical agents. These two elements did not constitute 'conclusive' evidence. This was the verdict of Shultz's British counterpart, Sir Geoffrey Howe: 'If conclusive evidence is obtained, then punitive measures against Iraq have not been ruled out.' As neither he nor Shultz is known to have made a further move to get at the truth, Iraq went unpunished.
That was the end of the story - until the hawks in the Bush administration recently began bandying about the revolting phrase of 'gassing his own people' for their partisan ends.
Even if democracy were achieved in the Middle East, what kind of governments would it produce? Would they cooperate with the United States on important policy objectives besides curbing terrorism, such as advancing the Arab-Israeli peace process, maintaining security in the Persian Gulf, and ensuring steady supplies of oil? No one can predict the course a new democracy will take, but based on public opinion surveys and recent elections in the Arab world, the advent of democracy there seems likely to produce new Islamist governments that would be much less willing to cooperate with the United States than are the current authoritarian rulers.
The answers to these questions should give Washington pause. The Bush administration's democracy initiative can be defended as an effort to spread American democratic values at any cost, or as a long-term gamble that even if Islamists do come to power, the realities of governance will moderate them or the public will grow disillusioned with them. The emphasis on electoral democracy will not, however, serve immediate U.S. interests either in the war on terrorism or in other important Middle East policies.
Given such incomplete information, only preliminary conclusions from the academic literature are possible. However, even these seem to discredit the supposedly close link between terrorism and authoritarianism that underlies the Bush administration's logic. In a widely cited study of terrorist events in the 1980s, the political scientists William Eubank and Leonard Weinberg demonstrate that most terrorist incidents occur in democracies and that generally both the victims and the perpetrators are citizens of democracies. Examining incidents from 1975 to 1997, Pennsylvania State University's Quan Li has found that although terrorist attacks are less frequent when democratic political participation is high, the kind of checks that liberal democracy typically places on executive power seems to encourage terrorist actions. In his recent book, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, Robert Pape finds that the targets of suicide bombers are almost always democracies, but that the motivation of the groups behind those bombings is to fight against military occupation and for self-determination. Terrorists are not driven by a desire for democracy but by their opposition to what they see as foreign domination.
The numbers published by the U.S. government do not bear out claims of a close link between terrorism and authoritarianism either. Between 2000 and 2003, according to the State Department's annual "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report, 269 major terrorist incidents around the world occurred in countries classified as "free" by Freedom House, 119 occurred in "partly free" countries, and 138 occurred in "not free" countries. (This count excludes both terrorist attacks by Palestinians on Israel, which would increase the number of attacks in democracies even more, and the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, which originated in other countries.) This is not to argue that free countries are more likely to produce terrorists than other countries. Rather, these numbers simply indicate that there is no relationship between the incidence of terrorism in a given country and the degree of freedom enjoyed by its citizens. They certainly do not indicate that democracies are substantially less susceptible to terrorism than are other forms of government.
There is, in other words, no solid empirical evidence for a strong link between democracy, or any other regime type, and terrorism, in either a positive or a negative direction. In her highly praised post-September 11 study of religious militants, Terror in the Name of God, Jessica Stern argues that "democratization is not necessarily the best way to fight Islamic extremism," because the transition to democracy "has been found to be an especially vulnerable period for states across the board." Terrorism springs from sources other than the form of government of a state. There is no reason to believe that a more democratic Arab world will, simply by virtue of being more democratic, generate fewer terrorists.
It is highly unlikely that democratically elected Arab governments would be as cooperative with the United States as the current authoritarian regimes. To the extent that public opinion can be measured in these countries, research shows that Arabs strongly support democracy. When they have a chance to vote in real elections, they generally turn out in percentages far greater than Americans do in their elections. But many Arabs hold negative views of the United States. If Arab governments were democratically elected and more representative of public opinion, they would thus be more anti-American. Further democratization in the Middle East would, for the foreseeable future, most likely generate Islamist governments less inclined to cooperate with the United States on important U.S. policy goals, including military basing rights in the region, peace with Israel, and the war on terrorism.
When it works, liberal democracy is the best form of government. But there is no evidence that it reduces or prevents terrorism. The fundamental assumption of the Bush administration's push for democracy in the Arab world is seriously flawed.
I think you're being way underdramatic here. We are faced with an enemy, the itm, who have proclaimed their doctrine to be death or slavery of all those who do not share their belief system. The itm have demonstrated their ability, absent strong and effective resistance, to continually recruit youths from all over the world to mass murder civilians and those youths themselves in support of the itm's quest for power.
To defeat terrorist you must eliminate the reasons they become terrorist. We, America, is one of the primary causes of terrorism. Our invasion of Iraq has caused terrorism to spread. We have contributed to its strength. Bush is not fighting terrorist, he's helping, in his own incompetent way, to make it stronger.
