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Posted By: wow Looking ahead ... food for thought - 09/17/01 10:27 AM
An article in today's International Herald Tribune:

http://www.iht.com/articles/32719.html

A taste of the article follows:
Saudi Arabia's own tortured compromise between alliance with the United States - capital of materialism - and its professed Islamic fundamentalism, to which the Saudi masses are attached, must one day collapse, just as the Shah's regime in Iran collapsed.
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Mr. bin Laden, 44, an engineer by training, is a committed Wahhabi Muslim whose first political engagement was at the side of the CIA in fighting the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
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Like many of the Mujahidin, he refused demobilization when Russia abandoned the Afghan war. He had a new war to fight, to save his own country, and his religion, from the United States.
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Los Angeles Times Syndicate.

Posted By: wwh Re: Looking ahead ... food for thought - 09/17/01 01:15 PM
If there are many other members of the Wahhabi, I wonder why bin Laden did not work primarily to overthrow the present government of Saudi Arabia. He has succeeded in making us very angry, but I don't see how that helps him achieve his goal, which presumably is another theocracy like Iran. He may have increased the number of recruits to his cause, but some of the recruits could be CIA informants. What is his next step likely to be?

Posted By: Capital Kiwi Re: Looking ahead ... food for thought - 09/17/01 07:48 PM
What is his next step likely to be?

Over a cliff would be nice.

Posted By: TEd Remington Over a cliff - 09/17/01 07:59 PM
>Over a cliff would be nice.

When push comes to shove, they'll just blame us for it.

I am beginning to understand the despair a woman who has been raped feels when she is somehow blamed for her plight. I noted that between the lines in the two UK editorials that were discussed here over the weekend. Somehow the victim becomes the cause of the tragedy. How did we become the enemy of Islam anyway? The last I heard Islam was one of the faster growing religions in the United States, a country that was pretty much founded on religious tolerance.

And I don't want bin Liner (I LOVE that name!) dead. I want him locked up in a solitary cell for the rest of his natural life. If he needs a kidney transplant so he can stay alive another ten years, call on me. It is important that he not become a martyr, which would surely happen if we took him out in an attack or a "wet operation." Perhaps next door to Kaczynski; then they could talk about bombs during their one hour a day in the exercise yard.

Posted By: wow Re: For all to see - 09/17/01 11:34 PM
He should be brought to justice in a trial televised world-wide...let people hear and see him. Nothing would cause his downfall faster.
I am concerned about the action of Congress in rushing a bill to the floor of the House for consideration of a repeal of the law (passed in Ford Administration I think) that forbids assassination of governmental leaders (cast your minds back to the debacles with Castro) ...all you do with assassination is make people wonder if he/she is really dead ...think of the stories about Hitler's being in South America, etc., because he was not brought to open trial.
I'm done now.
mutter, mutter, sigh.

Posted By: Capital Kiwi Re: For all to see - 09/18/01 05:20 AM
I suppose locking him up in solitary would be salutary. You can't drive an insane man crazy, can you. But he'd still be a martyr.

Much better if he's quietly and privately removed from the scene with absolutely no publicity and no announcement that he's been got. Leaders who disappear rather than die publicly and messily do NOT become martyrs. There's always the suspicion in the back of their followers' minds that they've just decamped ...

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