THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ, ELEVENTH THREAD

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/terrorism/international/fatwa_1996.html
Osama Bin Laden "Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places"-1996.

I say to you ... These youths [love] death as you love life.
…Those youths know that their rewards in fighting you, the USA, is double than their rewards in fighting some one else not from the people of the book. They have no intention except to enter paradise by killing you. An infidel, and enemy of God like you, cannot be in the same hell with his righteous executioner.

… Few days ago the news agencies had reported that the Defence Secretary of the Crusading Americans had said that "the explosion at Riyadh and Al-Khobar had taught him one lesson: that is not to withdraw when attacked by coward terrorists".

We say to the Defence Secretary that his talk can induce a grieving mother to laughter! and shows the fears that had enshrined you all. Where was this false courage of yours when the explosion in Beirut took place on 1983 AD (1403 A.H). You were turned into scattered pits and pieces at that time; 241 mainly marines solders were killed. And where was this courage of yours when two explosions made you to leave Aden in lees than twenty four hours!

But your most disgraceful case was in Somalia; where- after vigorous propaganda about the power of the USA and its post cold war leadership of the new world order- you moved tens of thousands of international force, including twenty eight thousands American solders into Somalia. However, when tens of your solders were killed in minor battles and one American Pilot was dragged in the streets of Mogadishu you left the area carrying disappointment, humiliation, defeat and your dead with you. Clinton appeared in front of the whole world threatening and promising revenge , but these threats were merely a preparation for withdrawal. You have been disgraced by Allah and you withdrew; the extent of your impotence and weaknesses became very clear. It was a pleasure for the "heart" of every Muslim and a remedy to the "chests" of believing nations to see you defeated in the three Islamic cities of Beirut , Aden and Mogadishu.

http://www.ict.org.il/articles/fatwah.htm
Osama Bin Laden: Text of Fatwah Urging Jihad Against Americans-1998
… On that basis, and in compliance with Allah's order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims:
The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah, "and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together," and "fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah."

http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg00035.html
Al-Qaida Statement Warning Muslims Against Associating With The Crusaders And Idols; Translation By JUS; Jun 09, 2004 from the Al-Qaida Organization of the Arab Gulf; 19 Rabbi Al-Akhir 1425
… No Muslim should risk his life as he may inadvertently be killed if he associates with the Crusaders, whom we have no choice but to kill.

… Everything related to them such as complexes, bases, means of transportation, especially Western and American Airlines, will be our main and direct targets in our forthcoming operations on our path of Jihad that we, with Allah's Power, will not turn away from.

The 'Real' al Qaeda
Dems talk Afghanistan, but do nothing.
by Frederick W. Kagan
Daily Standard
04/09/2008 12:00:00 AM

ONE THEME THAT emerged clearly at the Senate hearings with General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker was the need to abandon Iraq in order to deal with the real center of the war on terror in South Asia. A series of questioners put on the airs of grand strategic sophisticates to remind Petraeus that whereas his brief includes only Iraq, theirs covers the entire world--and from their viewpoint, the fight that matters is not the one that Petraeus and Crocker and their subordinates are winning in Iraq, but the one in the "Afghan-Pakistan border region," as it was so often called. Petraeus and Crocker pointed out repeatedly and accurately that al Qaeda's leaders themselves continually refer to Iraq as the central front in their war against us, but to no avail. The real fight, they were told each time, is in the Afghan-Pakistan border region against the real al Qaeda that the Intelligence Community says has only grown stronger. And, the general and the ambassador were lectured, keeping too many troops in Iraq was preventing the United States from prevailing in this more important fight. Let's consider this thesis in a little more detail.

To begin with, numerous senators spoke of the Afghan-Pakistan border area as though there were no border--forces poured into Afghanistan would somehow directly affect what was going on in Pakistan or, alternatively, the real al Qaeda was on the Afghan side where U.S. troops could get at them. Speaking ethnographically, of course, there is no border--the Durand

Line that separates Afghanistan from Pakistan cuts the Pashtun nation just about in half, and the porous border has seen decades of happy smuggling. But the border is very real both to our forces and to their enemies. Our troops know that they cannot cross into Pakistan, and the enemy knows it too. That's why the bases of the "real" al Qaeda are not in Afghanistan--American troops in Afghanistan report very few al Qaeda fighters and those they do come across are mostly operating out of Pakistani bases. The al Qaeda bases that harbor Osama bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri, and the other al Qaeda leaders plotting the attacks against which the Intelligence Community warns are in Pakistan--principally Waziristan in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Chitral in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP).

Pouring troops into Afghanistan does not address those problems. Even advocating an invasion of those areas (with or without Islamabad's consent) makes little sense--al Qaeda works also with Kashmiri separatists, who have their own terror training bases outside of these areas, and we can be certain that the Pakistani government that supports the Kashmiri fighters will not be enthusiastic about American forces taking them out. And, even if they were, by this point we're pretty much occupying half of Pakistan. We could line a lot of soldiers up along the (20,000-foot) mountains along the border, but how does sealing the terrorists into their own base camps in Pakistan help? The problem isn't that they go into Afghanistan, but that we have no good plan for getting them out of Pakistan. That is a problem worthy of many senatorial hearings, and it would be nice if any of the advocates of losing in Iraq to fight the real enemy in South Asia had a solution to propose. It should be a sine qua non, in fact, for anyone who proposes accepting defeat in Iraq first to offer a concrete plan for doing something against the supposedly realer al Qaeda enemy in Pakistan.

Afghanistan is extremely important in its own right, of course, and if we fail in Afghanistan, then we will indeed offer al Qaeda another potential base from which to operate. Considering how well established it already is in Pakistan and how little Afghanistan--one of the most desperately poor countries on earth--has to offer the terrorists, it's a bit hard to see why they would relocate, but we should certainly deny them the opportunity. There are many other reasons to succeed in Afghanistan as well, moreover, including the possibility of developing a stable, democratic ally in the heart of a key region that is a producer rather than a consumer of security.
But now we must consider another set of questions: How urgently do we need to send more troops to Afghanistan, and is there really nothing else we can do? At the end of 2006, Iraq was so close to complete catastrophe that nothing short of a military surge supporting a changed military strategy had any chance of success. We were within a hair's breadth of defeat. That is not the case in Afghanistan. The Taliban insurgency has grown in strength, particularly in the south, government control remains weak, security forces are small and inadequately trained and equipped, corruption is rampant, and so on. But the situation is not deteriorating that rapidly, and relatively small additions of force--with improved approaches--have made a significant difference in important areas. NATO certainly needs to send significant additional forces to Afghanistan, and the United States will probably

have to contribute most of them. But the urgency is nothing like what it was in Iraq in December 2006, and is driven more by the need to secure Afghan elections in 2009 than by the danger that the country is about to collapse.

To the question, "Is there really nothing we can do unless we send more troops?" the answer is unequivocally that there is something we can do. Congress can do it, in fact, and very quickly. Pass the supplemental defense appropriation that would allow development money to flow reliably to our soldiers in Afghanistan as well as Iraq. The advantage of Afghanistan's poverty (for us) is that a little money goes a long way. American soldiers have increasingly been leveraging development funds to starve the insurgency of recruits in a way similar to what has worked in Iraq (but tailored appropriately to conditions in Afghanistan). They need more money. One of the problems the British face in the south of the country is that their government does not give their soldiers development money to spend. We should find ways to help them out. Congress could do all of this with one roll-call vote in each house, and the aid would start flowing to Afghanistan faster than any additional brigades could arrive. American soldiers in Iraq often say that dollars are their best bullets--the same is true in Afghanistan. If the congressmen who evince so much concern about Afghanistan's well-being really had the success of our effort at heart, they would stop playing political football with the supplemental and send the aid they control to our soldiers in this key front right away. The fact that they have preferred to delay the supplemental in order to threaten to force the president to withdraw forces from Iraq--a tactic that hinders the effort in the theater they say is the most important in order to force a change of strategy in a secondary (to them) theater--speaks volumes.

Frederick W. Kagan, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of "Iraq: The Way Ahead," the Iraq Planning Group's phase IV report.

"American soldiers in Iraq often say that dollars are their best bullets
--the same is true in Afghanistan."
should i cut and paste all the Anti war views?

Those countries are not a typical examples to substantiate the barbaric war.

When the population of a sovereign nation have notions and wishes such as we see below, how ought we to value those wishes and notions?

Ought we to ignore them, desiring what is good for them while presuming we know better than they what is good for them?

Ought we to ignore them, but do so because we are acting in our own interests in occupying that sovereign nation (meanwhile, for the obvious PR reasons, pretending otherwise)?

Ought we, on the principle of respect for freedom and sovereignty, to act in accordance with their wishes/notions?

ican, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself". Your fearmongering is passe after 7 years of Bushie.

ican, what's scary about the Bushie family is the way they arm and fund a Hitler, Saddam and bin Laden and get rich off the blowback.

ican, so you see arming madmen as being funny? Are you denying history that's so well documented? Of course you are. It's what you do. But that wont alter the history any.