Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Very tough, but for different reasons than you propose.
I live in NYC. I was here when the hijacked airliners took down the World Trade Center towers. I've seen Ground Zero. I have vivid memories of the immediate aftermath.
Nevertheless, I had mixed feelings about US military involvement in Afghanistan. My concern wasn't with going in and kicking out the Taliban. I was all in favor of removing them from power. My worry was what would happen next.
The US approach tends to assume that the application of democracy cures all ills. The problem is, the seeds of democracy require fertile soil in which to take root and grow, and an assortment of preexisting conditions that simply aren't there in Afghanistan. My gut feel was that turning Afghanistan from a poverty ridden patchwork of feuding ethnic and tribal rivalries to a functioning and economically healthy nation of any sort, democratic or not, would take 50 years. The US tends to like the quick fix, and has a political system where a politician's time horizon extends only as far as the next election. I couldn't see us realistically committing to that long term an effort. But if we don't commit to a long term effort, what happens when we leave?
Similar considerations apply in Iraq. Saddam Hussein presided over a patchwork quilt of religious sects and ethnic groups who hated each other, and kept a lid on the pot through main force. We went in and removed Saddam, and that pot promptly boiled over. The fact that it did should have come as no surprise to anyone, though it apparently has.
They're shooting at each other. We happen to be caught in the middle.
So while you can argue over the morality of whether we should have gone in in the first place, we did, and the question I have now is whether we can morally leave and let the place go to hell in a handbasket. Like it or not, we're the ones stuck with trying to keep a lid on the pot. There are ways to address the conditions that keep the pot boiling, but again, they require a longer term commitment than we appear to be willing to make.
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Dennis
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The problem is identifying the enemy. In the past the enemy was more or less confined to a geographical area. With terrorists, they could be your next door neighbor who goes to your church (read church as any religious assembly place), is the same race as you are, or someone completely different. They don't wear signs saying "I am a terrorist". This makes it very difficult to determine the enemy. If it were not so then they would not be so terrifying. To label all of some class as the enemy because they are different from you, just generates more terror and Ricky said above. There is no easy answer. Maybe there is no answer at all, but being the type of person I am, I will continue to search for one, at least for myself.