I'm sorry I haven't had time to respond to you in depth to other posts, but when I read the above I had to ask about this:
" Born in Saudi Arabia to a Yemeni family, Bin Laden left Saudi Arabia in 1979 to fight against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Afghan jihad was backed with American dollars and had the blessing of the governments of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. He received security training from the CIA itself, according to Middle Eastern analyst Hazhir Teimourian. While in Afghanistan, he founded the Maktab al-Khidimat (MAK), which recruited fighters from around the world and imported equipment to aid the Afghan resistance against the Soviet army." from http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_155000/155236.stm It seems that Bin Laden is another in what seems to be a pattern of U.S. "clients" turned U.S. arch enemies. Saddam Hussain being another, Noriega a third and I'm sure there are more. Doug First, from The New Republic: "There was no blowback. America's involvement in Afghanistan in the 1980s didn't help create Osama bin Laden; Saudi Arabia's involvement in Afghanistan in the 1980s helped create Osama bin Laden, in large part because the United States was too timid to direct the war itself. Similarly, it wasn't America's intervention in Afghanistan in the 1990s that created the Taliban; it was Pakistan's intervention and America's non-intervention. Doves might consider this as they counsel the U.S. to respond to September 11 by leaving the rest of the world to its own devices. After all, it was leaving the rest of the world to its own devices that got us into this in the first place." http://www.tnr.com/100801/trb100801.html In fact, Bin Laden didn't even arrive in Afghanistan until the mid to late 1980s - if your source can't even get that right, it has little or no credibility. In 1979 he was still a Saudi playboy. _Even if it were true_ that Bin Laden had at one point been aided by the US - that wouldn't mean anything in the current situation. Aiding the mujaheddeen was a good idea. A very good idea. It led, quite directly, to the fall of the Soviet Union (most of us think that was a good thing) and was a bipartisan policy begun by Jimmy Carter and continued by Reagan. There was no way at the time to predict that someone like Bin Laden would turn against the United States - or, for that matter, even survive the war, given the casualty rates involved. So we didn't help Bin Laden in the 1980s, and if we had, it would, given what we knew at the time, have been a good idea. Third, why on earth are you so determined to believe that everything is our fault? Who the hell is Hazhir Teimourian, for that matter? What do you want us to do, Doug, only work with saints who have halos if you look closely? There aren't very many of them out there. There is something profoundly wrong with this worldview. The United States is part of the world. It has interests in the world. There are bad people in the world. Sometimes they fight other bad people. As I have no particular desire to try and conquer the entire world, sometimes you have to sponsor some bad people in fighting other bad people who are more of a threat to us. Occassionally, some of these people will turn on us. First, doesn't that give us a _greater_ responsibility to deal with them, as we did to Noriega and are about to do with Hussein? Who was, btw, far less of a client to the US than you seem to imagine - our only real help to him was sharing some intelligence during the Iran-Iraq war. You might have noticed during the Gulf War that all of the equipment used by the Iraqi army was Soviet. And since Iran was a sworn enemy to the US that had already killed bunches of American citizens while Hussein was not, why should we not have acted against the Iranian government? As far as I can tell, Doug, your vision of foreign policy is that everything we do is wrong whatever the context. I suppose the logical conclusion is that we should do nothing. Given all of the good that the United States has done in the world in the twentieth century, and all of the bad things that have happened when we have withdrawn from it, I question that policy assessment. Sometimes you make mistakes. Sometimes you have to work with people you'd rather not. And sometimes some of those people turn against you. But sometimes they don't, and you can't know which. And even if they do, you might occassionally want to think about what we do achieve. Supporting the mujahedeen in their just battle to free their country from a Soviet invasion - or is invading a country only bad when we do it to establish a free government, but okay when the USSR does it to establish a Communist dictatorship, btw? That would be just in and of itself, regardless of outside concerns. We had the nice externality that it would cripple the Soviet Union. Well, that was a good thing too. If you, in 1979, could have predicted that the people we supported might, in the future, have turned against us, then prove it and I'll vote for you for President on the grounds of omniscience. Gautam
