No. 2 Al Qaeda leader dead from drone strike

#152
#152
7thgroupvolfan said:
So you speak arabic or do you have an english version?
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I have both (three English, one Arabic); I only read Arabic (do not speak Arabic) and, even at that, I am pretty terrible.

I read the Haleem translation, and I do check the aggressive passages against the other English translations I have, Arabic, and with Arabic friends to ensure that I get those mostly correct. The Qur'an certainly allows killing disbelievers on three conditions:

1. They are oppressing Muslims.
2. They are breaking treaties with Muslims.
3. They are destroying Muslim sites/lands.
 
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#157
#157
7thgroupvolfan said:
That's why we must educate them. They'll believe whatever you tell them. The lack of educated people in this country is staggering. Only about 15-20% can read.
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If I thought it were possible, I would be on board with spending billions, or even trillions, to do so. I just think that for education, particularly the education of the poor, society must already value education. That would require a multi-generational effort, though. We would be better off colonizing for two to the generations and forcing their poor into schools.
 
#159
#159
therealUT said:
If I thought it were possible, I would be on board with spending billions, or even trillions, to do so. I just think that for education, particularly the education of the poor, society must already value education. That would require a multi-generational effort, though. We would be better off colonizing for two to the generations and forcing their poor into schools.
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Guess what insurgents target over here all the time? You guest it...the schools we build for them. Know why? Because knoweledge is power. That's really all these people need is education and hope that their lives can change. Not all are on board, of course.
 
#163
#163
n_huffhines said:
OK. That's fine if that is your reasoning for intervening, but the point is they are retaliating against our intervening actions. They don't hate us for how we live, they hate us for how we intrude.
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I follow orders just like everyone else. I don't pick and choose my battles. We all have our own opinions and unless you've walked in those shoes it's hard to understand the mentality.
 
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#164
#164
7thgroupvolfan said:
I follow orders just like everyone else. I don't pick and choose my battles. We all have our own opinions and unless you've walked in those shoes it's hard to understand the mentality.
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As much as you think you absolutely disagree with my stance on war, I think you would actually appreciate the major part of my thesis (though, you would still disagree). I am focused on limiting the engagements that the U.S. enters, but I am also for giving the troops on the ground the ability to do whatever it takes for them to survive (even it that means killing 1,000s of civilians). If you would like, I can email it to you (I will provide my email address if you want this); or I can post major chunks of it here if you are interested.
 
#166
#166
7thgroupvolfan said:
I follow orders just like everyone else. I don't pick and choose my battles. We all have our own opinions and unless you've walked in those shoes it's hard to understand the mentality.
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I guess I didn't know what you were talking about then. I thought you were justifying intervention, but it sounds like you are justifying your role in the equation...which I'm not attacking.
 
#167
#167
therealUT said:
Really? When?

If you are referring to Pearl, we were certainly not taking a non-interventionist role toward either theater. In Europe, we were shipping military goods and equipment to Britain, as well as signing the lend-lease deal and the bases for battleships deal. In the Pacific, we placed embargoes against Japan, between 1939 and 1941, that led to an 80% reduction in their fuel imports; thus crippling their industry.

While an embargo (as opposed to a blockade) is not technically an act of war, it certainly is intervention (just not military intervention).
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We tried negotiating deals between Israel and Palestine. Both sides share blame but it is/was terrorism on one side that helped all parties to the table (not discounting Israel role in it, just making a point). When it comes to religious differences ( whether real or perceived) all bets are off. Cut the fore play and take care of business. Let's be honest here, as far as attacks on American soil, which would have prevented it better, a treaty with a terrorist state or crippling their command and control militarily?
 
#168
#168
rjd970 said:
We tried negotiating deals between Israel and Palestine. Both sides share blame but it is/was terrorism on one side that helped all parties to the table (not discounting Israel role in it, just making a point). When it comes to religious differences ( whether real or perceived) all bets are off. Cut the fore play and take care of business.
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It was the terrorism and the bad faith on both sides that caused the Camp David Accords to fail, and fail miserably.

rjd970 said:
Let's be honest here, as far as attacks on American soil, which would have prevented it better, a treaty with a terrorist state or crippling their command and control militarily?
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Prevented, as in prior to 9/11 (or, even prior to 1993)? Well, if we would have killed all the terrorists, they would, obviously, not have attacked us; however, we would have killed them for an attack that we thought would happen.

On a serious note, I am not sure if negotiating, seriously negotiating, with the terrorists (i.e., taking OBL's grievances seriously) would have prevented 9/11; however, it might have and we would have been no worse off had we tried. These were bin Laden's grievances from his 1998 Fatwa:

First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.

If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.

Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.

So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors. Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.
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I do not think it would have been absurd to attempt to negotiate with bin Laden and offer to remove our troops from Saudi Arabia, end the air campaign over Iraq, and end our alliance with Israel. That would put the ball in bin Laden's court; if he then attempted to attack Americans after that, then maybe we resort to war in Afghanistan.
 
#169
#169
Prevented as in since 911. How many have there been since, would negotiating post 911 have been as effective as armed conflict? My bet is it would have brought on more than prevented.
 
#170
#170
rjd970 said:
Prevented as in since 911. How many have there been since, would negotiating post 911 have been as effective as armed conflict? My bet is it would have brought on more than prevented.
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I could not tell you if it would have been effective; however, I can tell you that we have made that bet with over 1,800 KIAs in Afghanistan, alone, and hundreds of billions of dollars. And, at the end of the day, the Taliban might not only be in power in Afghanistan, but they also will not be worrying about that pesky Northern Alliance.
 
#171
#171
therealUT said:
I could not tell you if it would have been effective; however, I can tell you that we have made that bet with over 1,800 KIAs in Afghanistan, alone, and hundreds of billions of dollars. And, at the end of the day, the Taliban might not only be in power in Afghanistan, but they also will not be worrying about that pesky Northern Alliance.
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And there hasn't been a single terrorist attack on American soil and al Qaeda barely exists anymore. Would negotiating have accomplished that?
 
#172
#172
rjd970 said:
And there hasn't been a single terrorist attack on American soil and al Qaeda barely exists anymore. Would negotiating have accomplished that?
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They might have; again, I do not have a definitive answer for you. I do know that by not negotiating we have definitely suffered over 1,800 dead soldiers in Afghanistan and spent half a trillion dollars.

It is quite possible that we could have tried to negotiate and then ended up doing the exact same thing and paying the exact same price; I am not ruling that possibility out. It is also possible that we could have avoided having our soldiers killed in Afghanistan, we could have saved five-hundred billion dollars, and we might have avoided further terrorist attacks. These are things we will never know, though, because we resorted directly to war.
 
#173
#173
therealUT said:
They might have; again, I do not have a definitive answer for you. I do know that by not negotiating we have definitely suffered over 1,800 dead soldiers in Afghanistan and spent half a trillion dollars.

It is quite possible that we could have tried to negotiate and then ended up doing the exact same thing and paying the exact same price; I am not ruling that possibility out. It is also possible that we could have avoided having our soldiers killed in Afghanistan, we could have saved five-hundred billion dollars, and we might have avoided further terrorist attacks. These are things we will never know, though, because we resorted directly to war.
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First off I will help you. If negotiated, al quaeda would have still been around, maybe this time demanding some other grievance be fixed. We can know this.

Here in reality we don't have the luxury of 20/20 hindsight you want to enjoy with your superior philosophical battering. You pick a course of action and hope it is the best solution. My view is the right call was made in Afghanistan given the circumstances at the time, negotiation was off the table. Iraq was a mistake, and I don't think all other options were fully explored.

I just don't see how negotiating with a terrorist organization would have been anything other than disastrous. It only would have brought on other attacks.
 
#174
#174
rjd970 said:
First off I will help you. If negotiated, al quaeda would have still been around, maybe this time demanding some other grievance be fixed. We can know this.
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We do not know this; and, even if AQ were still around, if we negotiated and they were not attacking us, then what would be the problem?

rjd970 said:
Here in reality we don't have the luxury of 20/20 hindsight you want to enjoy with your superior philosophical battering. You pick a course of action and hope it is the best solution. My view is the right call was made in Afghanistan given the circumstances at the time,
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We were not pressed for time against the Taliban or AQ; moreover, we knew that the members of the cells that orchestrated the 9/11 attacks had been in the U.S. for almost a year before the attacks. If there had been another imminent attack in the works, it would have been reasonable to think that attacking Afghanistan would not have derailed those imminent attacks. That provided us with a window of opportunity in which we could have explored the possibility of negotiating; we could have tested the faith of the Taliban offer to hand over bin Laden.

rjd970 said:
Iraq was a mistake, and I don't think all other options were fully explored.
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If you were the head of the CIA in 2002, and we handed a preliminary, but unverified report that Saddam was both operating mobile WMD labs and working with al Qaeda, you would not have acted immediately to take out the threat? You would have waited to confirm the data, presented the case to the UN, explored more options, etc? How is this time-gap any different that the time-gap that would have been given to AQ had we decided to test the faith of the Taliban negotiation offers?

rjd970 said:
I just don't see how negotiating with a terrorist organization would have been anything other than disastrous. It only would have brought on other attacks.
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It might have brought on another attack; attacking Afghanistan had all the potential in the world to invite attacks from Syrian, Palestinian, Egyptian, Lybian, and Saudi terrorists (you know, the places where the actual hijackers actually came from). You are relying on hindsight to support your side of the argument as well (that no terrorist attacks have occurred, when they certainly could have come from many other nations with terrorist cells and organizations). So, maybe I should not have used the figures (1,800 and $500M); but, it was certain that by going to war in Afghanistan we would lose at least one soldier and spend at least $33.8B (initial outlay for the war).
 
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#175
#175
rjd970 said:
And there hasn't been a single terrorist attack on American soil and al Qaeda barely exists anymore. Would negotiating have accomplished that?
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Absolutely not.

Imagine, a massive super power negotiating with some nut job that lives in a freakin' cave with no sustainable army? No we would've come across as total p@ssies.

Do you think China or the Russians would've negotiated with Osama if he were attacking them. Fawk no.
 
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