"Friedrich Ostertag" wrote in message
...
Hi Tom,

As much as I question the value of the military action in Iraq in
terms
of the war on terror,

And an effective alternative is...what?

better intelligence work could have prevented 9/11 for a start.

And what could we have done with that intelligence?

I would guess you realize it's not like in the James Bond movies, and for
information to be even moderately accurate is a bonus.

Or
choosing our friends more wisely would be a good idea. E.g. not
supplying terrorists like OBL with weapons just because at the moment
they are shooting them at people we don't like.

We supplied the Muhajeen with weapons to fight off the Soviets in
Afghanistan...that was a righteous fight. Oddly, we supplied the Soviets
with Lend-Lease equipment 40 yers earlier. using that formula, we'd never
had divorces between couple that once were in love but now want to kill each
other.

Who, under that measure, could we ever consider our "friends"?

Please note that I'm not ruling out military action as an option, if
there is reason to believe that possible future terrorist acts can be
prevented.

Prevented how?

Afghanistan was justified in my view, given that the taliban
openly supported OBL, only the job was not finished (yet again!).

What would "finish" that job in your view?

Iraq
was never really about terrorism, was it?

They supplied equipment, training, military intelligence, possibly funding.
Very likely they would have provided WMD's when developed. As for where WMD
were, remember what Saddamn did with his Air Force in the first Gulf War?
Sent it to Iran. Remember what he did with it during the current war? Sent
it to Syria. Remember the pictures in the papers (NY TImes IIRC) of the
convoy's heading to Syria just before the war? Remember the freighter saling
to North Korea (just before the invasion) that was traveling "dark" in
contravention of maritime law?


Maybe the bush administration
was really that much mistaken about Iraqs capabilities to build WMDs,

Well, the so was the rest of the world, and msot of the democrats. Get ahold
of the list of quotes by democras, including Bill and Hillarious Clinton,
making the point that Iraq had WMD and waere ready to use them.

i
can't judge that. But Saddam was never harbouring terrorists, because
he hated islamic fundamentalists and they hated him.

Funny, isn't it, that the Islamic terrorists were buddies with the
atheistic USSR? Odd how various ethnic crime gangs (Italian, Irish, Jewish
mafias) manage to cooperate when there's a benefit to be gained. Look how
much cooperation there was between the Soviets an the Nazis up until 1941.

They both hated
the US, but for completely different reasons.

For Iraq, the US was the hurdle to his domination of the region; for the
Islamic fundelemtalists, it was our open, free and "immoral, infidel"
society.

http://prophetofdoom.net/

Negotiation only works with rational people..adn stringiny such process out
over twelve years