candidone1 wrote:Since all the token conservatives are demanding an answer from "Democrats" (as if it's only up to them to ddecide) on how to deal with militant Islam....perhaps I'll take a stab at it.
(So-called "militant Islam" in 2001 was of a different kind and quality than the militant Islam of 2006, so we must frame our discussion around how we should have dealt with it then.)
I would have begun first by publicly acknowledging that the United States has had a history of supporting radical/extremist mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan, and that this is potentially a monster that the US created. Perhaps I'm naive in thinking that honesty would have been beneficial in rallying support for a this malignant group. The US militarily funded and ideologically supported the voilent mujahideen in hopes of combatting Russian influence in the middle east. The Taliban was an eventual sconsequence.
The United States created the Taliban, and that needed to be publicly announced.
From there, the administration should have acknowledged the origin of the threat, and perhaps introspected not only the what and the where, but also the why behind the attacks....and not asking "why do they hate us when we're so good." Denial in this respect has proven costly.
Bush predictably decided that making terrorist-like non-negotiable demands of Afghanistan was more effective than diplomacy.
If escalating the level of violence was the only solution, then a mission to seek and destroy al Qaeda would have been appropriate, as the Taliban had fallen into disfavor throughout the region, support would have been almost universal both locally and internationally. The false connection with Iraq was transparent from the beginning, and only proved to be more so later on. Liberating the Iraqi people was not even the original war aim.
**I'll leave this and come back and finish this later, if there are any comments, I'll respond then. I have to get off to work**
I would suspect that had the United States
truly wanted to "bring the perpetrators to
justice", they would have sought a more legitimate means to their end (what would have most likely garnered unconditional support from the international community). Instead, the Bush administration manufactured evidence of a Saddam/al Qaeda connection and proceeded into Iraq after Saddam with exponentially more manpower than they had into Afghanistan for bin Laden. Suddenly, a regime change in Iraq constituted "justice" for the perpetrators of 9/11...and the American people bought it. It's also unfortunate that the Democrats bought the tripe peddled to them by this administration, because in hindsight, it makes them appear to have supported the invasion, but they supported it under the same false pretenses as the American public.
So, asking how the Dems would deal with militant Islam
now is completely unfair. You can't mislead them into a major, and poorly planned conflict and then say "Ok, you guys are taking such pleasure in lamb-basting Bush over Iraq, what would
you do...."
The Dems probably wouldn't have had such a hard on for Saddam because last time I checked, he didn't try to kill any of the Democrats' fathers.
This is
clearly a carry over of Bush I...and the republicans need to clean up the mess they got in to. IMO, that's why W. got re elected.
