Yes it's off topic but who cares right now.

Fri Sep 14 11:41:55 UTC 2001

On Thu, 13 Sep 2001, Eric A. Hall wrote:

> Let me state a couple of things. First of all, a direct attack on DC couldn't
> be any less a declaration of war. We must respond. We must also respond for NY
> lest it happen again. There is no question in my mind that we will soon be at
> war and I am supportive of that effort as the only viable option for keeping
> my family alive and safe.
>
> BUT, keep in mind that the majority of the people in Afghanistan are caught
> between armed factions in an internal conflict. They are simple farmers,
> peasants at best, suffering under the oppression of a fundamentalist regime on
> the left and warlords on the right. "Kill them all and let $DEITY sort them
> out" is the wrong thing to do, as it will bite us in the butt later.
>
> What we *should* do is crush the warlords who would give us the longest term
> grief in any occupation, decimate the leadership, and then bring in the Corp
> of Engineers and the Peace Corps to help the peasantry build a functional
> democracy for themselves. A modernized version of the Marshall Plan is about
> the only thing we haven't tried, and it would be much more rewarding in the
> long-term than killing them all.

Agreed for the most part. I think the general consensus is that after this
certain governments must be completely and systematically removed to
prevent this from ever occurring again. By removed I mean the people that
compose them utterly destroyed and annihilated. Many, if not most, were
not directly responsible for the attacks this past week, but I feel to
quash a ground-swell of support that it is possible to conduct these sort
of attacks against America, we need to be surgical in the removal of our
enemies.

The first and most obvious is the Taliban, including Bin Ladin.
We may was well remove Sadam and his cabinet while we are at it. I'm sure
there are many other militant anti-U.S. groups which are building strength
and need to be eliminated.

Now to my point, since I feel this needs to happen, I'm not too worried
about some of the innocents that will die in the process. Its a tragedy
when the lot of a child includes being killed at a young age due to the
war of its father's. War is not pretty though, neither is life or history
and we are an angry people, at some point it simply needs to be accepted
on some functional level bad and unjust events are always going to exist.

andy

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