Eide wrote:

"Gunner" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 8 Sep 2004 09:29:54 -0400, "Eide"
wrote:

That "sharp sword" has _really_ done well so far!

Indeed. Toppling two regimes, wiping out 80% of the leadership of a
global terror organization and freeing 50,000,000 people from
totalitarian governments.

To what end? A mission accomplished? I don't like the idea of a war on
terrorism - it gives the warlord a never ending supply of enemies. There can
never be an end to such a war. We definitely need to look at the log in our
own eye on this issue, i.e. why are we a target?

Why are we a target?
Simple. Our system works, theirs doesn't and a few of them hate us for it.

I could turn that into a doctoral dissertation, but that's it in a nutshell. It
is the victim's blame game writ large.

Was it worth it? Well, I happen to think that getting rid of a couple of the
most repressive, tryannical, scabrous and just plain evil regimes on the face of
the planet was worth it. YMMV however.

That said, I share your concern about the civil liberties implications of some
of the things we are doing, or which have been proposed. Americans have always
had a serious problem distinguishing between babies and bathwater when the
situation turns hairy. Indeed one of the reasons we mark this sad anniversary is
that we did some stupidly extreme things to our intelligence agencies back in
the 1970s. (Can you say "Church Commission"?) The difference is that given our
society's drift to statism, I'm not sure how far we'll come back from this
particular bout of excess.

--RC