[No Truce With Kings]

Nice set of straw men. None of what you stated changes the fact that between 4,000 and 30,000 Americans are dead in an attack on our country. Your solution to that problem is to hunker in the bunker, and say, please Mr. Man don't beat on us.

You'd have to be a donkey to swallow that much straw.

I'm not. Are you?

[AGAviator]

Your solution to that problem is to hunker in the bunker, and say, please Mr. Man don't beat on us

Your solution is to act like a street gangster doing a drive-by in another gang's turf, spraying bullets wildly and bragging that even if you didn't hit the other gangster, at least you got some of his "homies" or his family.

You still haven't addressed my statements about the money and the passports coming from non-Afghan countries. This thing does not begin or end in Afghanistan. There are some players there, and there are some who are not there. If you can find out who is and who isn't involved, then get them by all means. But we can't, which means we could be ignoring some more imminent threats while we go on a wild goose chase in the Hindu Kush.

I've been following the scene in Afghanistan since soon after the Soviets invaded in 1979. There were many pro-Western field commanders who could have had some influence there. They were not fanatics and they have relatives living in this country.

But our CIA and State Department left matters to the Pakistani ISI, and once the Soviets were out of there, we gave ourselves a little victory party and then dropped the entire country like a hot rock. That created so much anarchy that even a movement like the Taliban was considered an improvement over the complete chaos in that country.

Now I repeat, it is unlikely that Bin Ladin directed this specific attack. He is a poster boy. Get it? A poster boy. But if we want to string people up for the mess that place is in, we can start right in Washington DC.

There are probably still some ex field commanders with some support who could run things better if they got a chance. But there's quite a lot of resentment toward the US, who used that people to get some payback for Viet Nam from the Soviets, then blew billions on Russia without giving a dime to help their former allies.

This mess didn't happen by accident. Those people were once solidly on our side, and we shitted on them. And now we're getting ready to wipe them all out as a further display of our ingratitude.