I'm going to play the devil's advocate, just for fun, but also because there are always intelligent alternatives to any given course of action.

Bin Laden's "manifesto" can be found here. He sets six conditions out, and if they are not met, he will continue to kill us.

You can read the six items for yourself, but they boil down to this:

(1) Accept the Islamic religion, or die.

(2) Get rid of homosexuals, alcohol, gambling, and charging interest on financial transactions, or die.

(4) Abandon our support of Israel, and anti-terrorism in India, Chechen, and the Phillipines, or die.

(5) Leave all bases and facilities in the Middle East, or die.

(6) Abandon our support of any pro-American Arabic leaders, or die.

(7) Now, negotiate with us based on our "mutual interests and benefits." Oh, did we mentions abandoning support for the Jews?

Liberals can spend all their time trying to "grok" these things, to figure out where bin Laden is "coming from." I think we all have a pretty good idea where he's coming from.

Somewhere along the line, people got the idea that "articulate" means "intelligent," or even "sane." Sorry. No connection. It doesn't matter how well bin Laden writes, he is, or was, a psychotic who would annihilate much of the world if given the tools to do so.

Bin Laden is a symbol. His desires mirror that of more fundamental Islam and that is why he has such support among both the hardcore religionist powerbrokers and the less than literate.

In the greater context waging a war against Bin Laden, Saddam or the insurgency is being twisted by these folks as a war against Allah in a nutshell they are saying to these followers, "You are either with Allah or against him."

Whether Bin Laden is any more violent or sociopathic than many who profess to speak for Allah remains to be seen. I suspect he is more of a rhetorical warrior (like you Tom!), living comfortably, and spurring the troops to murder in the name of Allah while keeping his hands from the blood because Gooptm is hard to come by in the Middle East.

Now. How do you "block" something like this? The Left has run itself around in circles convinced that somehow there's a painless way. That somehow "anybody but Bush" would have the secret, the magic words that would convince bin Laden, Zarqawi, or any of the others that there is a reasonable alternative.

Ah, but there are those alternatives. We could have ignored both Bin Laden and his organization. We could have just continued on as normal. Statistically they only seem to get a direct hit every several years and so really present a limited danger to the US.

By shining a light on him, and pursuing him it raised his 'esteem' level among his illiterate and literate followers. Take a few thousand casualties every half decade and write it off. Life goes on.

That was one valid alternative. Maybe the US would have lost a few points in perceived power, or then again maybe not. If you can walk away from it and depict it simply as a craven act, there are many who will not doubt US strength.

This would tend to reduce the potential for escalation. In 1961 Kennedy encouraged Americans to build bomb shelters for their family. Many felt such was encouragement for Khrushchev to build 100 megaton bombs instead of 20 megaton ones and to create firestorms "the size of Vermont" that would incinerate all cities and making such shelters worthless. Kennedy in a closed door session with scientists describing the US after an all-out nuclear attack said America's lack of government provided bomb shelters bordered on "criminal negligence". He wanted to start building huge shelters immediately but was told that might panic Americans and that 'Civil Defense" should be started up slowly. 45 years later America is just as vulnerable, perhaps moreso, to nuclear attack and yet none have yet occurred.

It can be argued that by preparing Americans for terror attacks, duct tape techniques, etcetera, that one is really encouraging not only terror attacks, but are escalating the scale of any such attacks as well.

Kerry lost the election because he had nothing better than Bush did. Nobody does. If the entire U.N. rose up as one against bin Laden, what's different? The same U.S. and British soldiers, the same U.S. equipment, doing the same things, except Officially Blessed by those who count.

If we had never gone into Iraq, would bin Laden have just "gone away?" If we had killed him, would the Islamists have given up?

Of course not. But they would revert to their general inferiority complexes. By not attacking them we would show how worthless of our attention they are. They would not be encouraged in their efforts to fight us, because we deemed them insignificant. Psychological warfare may have been just as effective as physical warfare--perhaps moreso, as the region has a history of persecution/inferiority complexes that would safely keep further attacks to a minimum.

Would they be any less pissed about our invasion of Afghanistan, home of the Taliban and home base of al Qaeda, than they are about Iraq, supposedly a sectarian enemy of the Islamists?

Wouldn't Guantanamo still be full of the very same people captured in Afghanistan as it is now?

If George W. Bush, or Al Gore, had never invaded Iraq, which of bin Laden's lunatic articles would have been satisifed? Hell, if we had never invaded Afghanistan, and were still based in Saudi Arabia supporting the no-fly zones, would bin Laden have been any happier? Anyone remember WHY al-Qaeda was founded?

Okay, say we never attacked Iraq in the first Gulf War. Just sat it out. No no-fly zones, no Kuwait any more, no troops in Saudi Arabia. Would we have been safe then? With Saddam's second nuclear weapons program left untouched? For how long?

Who knows? Maybe forever. Maybe we simply needed to strengthen our diplomatic ties for a cut of his increased oil output from the 'reclaimed territory' Kuwait?

That's what the Europeans were doing. Why shouldn't we?

We could have continued to pit Iraq against Iran and used Saddam to further prompt Saudi Arabia to cooperate with us as well.

The Shi'ite ruled Iraq is not a desirable outcome. The Iranians then have had no interference to pursue their own nuclear weapons program and Israel is no safer, because Iraq, as a threat, has merely been displaced by Iran.

There isn't anyplace to run, Robert. There isn't any political leader who can throw Bush out and save the day. We don't have a lot of choice but to keep fighting where we can.

Or surrender, and accept that every so often a few thousand Americans will die on our soil. Maybe we could get used to it. 9/11 wasn't much worse than the automobile toll, or damage from a natural disaster, and we recover from those all the time. Fatalism is easy, and nobody has to worry about pissing anyone off. When the nuclear exchange between Israel and the Arab world settles out, most of the radiation won't even get this far, and after the single civilized nation in the Middle East is eaten by the radicals, and Israel is no longer an issue, maybe they'll just stop. Maybe we can pay them, or something.

Exactly! See you knew it all along. The threat is statistically insignificant. Bush blew it. His advisors overreacted. We've lived in the shadow of nuclear armageddon for fifty years without sweating it, why start worrying about some folks who are so impotent technologically that they needed to hijack commercial airplanes and crash them into buildings?

We went over this many times before the election. Bush and his administration are working through all this, Iraq and many other nations, as best they can. Nobody has a "master plan." Not you, not the Democrats, not the U.N., not France. Sometimes throwing things at the wall to see what sticks is all there is to work with. I haven't heard jack from the Democrats other than "Bush is screwing up," and they had an entire election cycle to do it.

Here's John Kerry on what he would have done "better" in Iraq.

First, the President has to get the promised international support so our men and women in uniform don't have to go it alone.

All the international support we could get is already supporting us. The rest told us to go jump in the lake. Guess what: those same nations would have told President Kerry to go jump in the lake, too. Or does anyone honestly think that if Kerry asked, the French and Germans would roll troops into Iraq?

Second, the President must get serious about training Iraqi security forces.

How much more "serious" can you get? Exactly what would Kerry add to the mix that would suddenly speed up the training, and haul an army out of a totalitarian mindset into an effective fighting force? More money, maybe? The same money that Democrats are bitching about now? Or is billions of dollars more for Iraq okay if a Democratic president is asking for it?

Third, the President must carry out a reconstruction plan that finally brings tangible benefits to the Iraqi people.

Oh, yeah. We aren't doing ANY of this. And surely small Iraqi contractors will do just as good a job as large American industries that specialize in this kind of work. And if Iraqis do it, there won't be any corruption, right?

Fourth, the President must take immediate, urgent, essential steps to guarantee the promised elections can be held next year.

Check. Wait...who was it that thought elections should be postponed until things settle down?

George Bush has no strategy for Iraq. I do.

No. You had nothing different, and everybody knew it. And nothing different on the whole war on terror, either.

I use Kerry as an example, but many on the Left are making the same kind of noises. And they've got nothing, too.

If you've got a better method, clue us in. A lot of people would like to hear it. Or keep sitting on the sidelines and throwing rocks.

Kerry is an idiot. He would quote anything he felt would secure him the votes of the disgruntled. He just didn't realize he was running for the US Presidency and not for President of the EU.

Bush needs to realize that at this point its futile expected our troops to have any longterm stabilizing presence in the region. Pull out all the troops, save a fortified base deep in Kurd country, save the money and use it to bribe the neighboring countries to stop sending 'recruits' to the insurgency. Keep your big stick handy, but start working with bribes and honey again--violence gets boring. "Join us or die"...well that simply s--ks. That sells to Americans who have something to lose. When dealing with limited development and massive poverty it just incites more violence.

You're enlightened enough Tom - you knew this all the time.

;-)

SDAI-Tech1
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Pretty good, eh?

(See? I can out-liberal a liberal when the need arises)