"I don't think that Western Governments have deliberately tried to deal with radical Islam by supporting military strongmen...." Oh, they can claim that this was not their intended outcome, but it's like a Space Shuttle engineer saying they didn't want anything to explode, despite knowing about the freezing point of the O-ring material. At some point, the charge of negligence has to be applied. US policymakers are well aware of the fact that military strongment spend a disproportionate amount on their armed forces to keep them happy and loyal and pointing the guns at the people, which doesn't happen in a democratic govt. Military strongmen are not accountable to the people and don't need to attend to any social development needs to stay in power. This in turn feeds bitter and regressive movements like Islamists or Maoists who similarly live by the gun. " In the case of Musharraf, he came to power through the intrigues of his own countries politics, and he's the guy we have to work with." Musharraf came to power because because their army is unwilling to let go from a policy of jihadist expansionism, even if it means tossing out an elected civilian govt. We all know that even Musharraf is in danger of being tossed out for diverging from the jihad dream. US conservatives smugly remind others of their correct predictions that communism would eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions and inefficiencies. They point out that unhealthy systems can't cheat Mother Nature for long. And yet in order to encourage the demise of some unhealthy ideologies, the United States has shown a willingness to sustain other types of unhealthy ideologies (eg. support communism to fight fascism, support fascism or fundamentalism to fight communism, etc). Normally, the Pakistani military would have bankrupted its nation's treasury (that country has no oil), which should have then dried up its militarism, thus giving way to democracy. But the USA sustains the Pakistani military's expansionist fantasies by feeding it and keeping real-world consequences from catching up to it. Same thing with fundamentalism -- their movements should have died a long time ago because fundamentalism causes technological backwardness. But the US protects fundamentalist Gulf Sheikhdoms like Saudi and even indirectly helps Pakistani fundamentalists who get sustenance from the US-backed Pakistani military. So the US has indirectly been the greatest sponsor of the jihadist dream, by supporting and protecting jihadists from the communists. Yes, yes, US conservatives will argue that this was necessary in order to undermine communism, but nevertheless it is still what has brought us to this situation today. Dictators like Musharraf, Mubarak, Assad, Saudi Royals, need either military or financial support from an outside patron like the US, or otherwise they'd fold up like a house of cards. These dictators aren't doing anything for their people. The claim is made that they're providing stability today, but how can you sacrifice longterm stability and health that comes from development in exchange for short-term gain?

Sandman, it is a near total misunderstanding to assert that President Bush is making the mistakes of President Johnson over again - with the possible exception of "guns and butter." [I do wonder if cutting taxes when we should be raising them to pay for the war may not turn out to be a grave stategic error. Aside from the risk of inflation in the medium term, we also have virtually stopped buying warships.] In every other sense, the present situation has nothing in common with Vietnam. And President Bush is a great deal more ethical than President Johnson was. [One can fairly say that the characitures of Republicans as unethical businessmen would be more aptly applied to Johnson - and his brother - who ran no less than 26 companies on White House Stationary.] You betray an astounding lack of familiarity with the details of either or both conflicts to compare them. Bush is basically making an entirely different set of errors, and on a grossly smaller scale: at least Bush is fighting a war he did not choose and his fundamental strategy is sound. Johnson did not have to take us to war, and his strategy - including a secret deal with Mao - could never have produced victory.

I fear you waste your time, Mike-Golf. Those who criticize the USA for supporting dictators do not usually wish for the USA to oppose them. It is like the NPT - it is wonderful to believe in it so long as you don't have to enforce it. I think we have yet to become serious about wmd, and I don't expect this to change until we lose NYC and DC - or major fractions of them. THEN going after anyone who used wmd - as Saddam surely did - will not be controversial.

I am glad you brought up the Space Shuttle in a technical way Sanman. It confirms my theory that you don't do your homework and that you love to repeat charges you hear, without grasping that they are nonsense. There are indeed things that can be said critical of NASA, and of people who knew things that they did not act on, but the freezing point of O rings is not one of them.

OK Sanman: your turn. I happen to be very uneasy about Pakistan as "ally." But given the location of AQ in Afghanistan, the offensive there did make strategic sense (even the French seem to agree- since theirs is the second biggest air force committed). Presumably even YOU agree. What was our option if we did NOT accept Pakistan as an ally, for this campaign?

Your myopia leaps out at me. Saddam only invaded tiny Kuwait, he wasn't someone trying to redraw every border in the region. Saddam was just Noriega with more guns - a former crony who broke relations. He wasn't a Hitler, he wasn't the same domino threat that the Iranians are (look how many Shiite are spread around the Gulf). Note that Iran is the financial/military/spiritual/ideological patron of Hezbollah in Lebanon, which is on the other side of the Middle East far from Iranian borders. Saddam never gave any appreciable support to guerrilla groups. Of course the Pakistanis are a greater threat than the Iraqis. Iraq has 1/10 of their population, no nuclear program or other WMD, they've never had the deep-seated involvement with any Sunni fundamentalists, just like Qadaffi hasn't, because they would pose an immediate threat to his regime. My point is that the US supported fundamentalism in general to undermine communism, and now that same fundamentalism has turned into the new threat, more dire than the previous one. So yes, this could be "swallowing the horse", because you've finally Darwinistically created a threat that you can't cope with. Technically, it looks more like swallowing a virus more than swallowing a horse. The USA's sucess is based on being an open society with free flow of goods and even people. The terrorists' success is likewise based on exploiting the openness of society, and free flow of goods and people. (Do you really think AlQaeda could infiltrate North Korea?) The USA's foreign policy achilles heel is that it can't act against vital suppliers like Saudi, whose energy it needs to feed its economy. The terrorists likewise get lots of support from the same Saudi soil. The US supported the military-jihadist alliance in Pakistan to bleed the Soviets in Afghanistan, but the same jihadis (local fundamentalists + arabs) have perpetrated 9/11 (not Saddam!), while the Pak military has proliferated nuke tech far and wide, aggravating the threats from N.Korea and Iran.

Sanman wrote: "Saddam only invaded tiny Kuwait, he wasn't someone trying to redraw every border in the region." ???? (a polite way of saying "where the f*ck did that come from") is all I can say to that. It conveniently ignores the entire history of Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath party in Iraq from the time of the Ba'ath coup to the present day. Sanman wrote: "but the same jihadis (local fundamentalists + arabs) have perpetrated 9/11 (not Saddam!)" It is interesting to me that those who oppose the current strategy try to draw lines separating bad terrorists from ones we can accept. No one has been trying to argue that Saddam and the Ba'ath party were directly involved in 9/11. But this fight is not just against the perpetrators of 9/11. That vision is far too narrow. The enemy is anyone who supports or exports terrorism, not just the Shi'ite or Wahabi fundamentalists. By the way, Afghanistan was an instance of Wahabi fundamentalism, not Shi'ite. By your argument we should be ignoring Iran as well. The continuous reference to the US allying with the Soviet Union in WWII makes me wonder what your alternatives are. There were only 2. 1. We ally with Stalin and defeat Hitler 2. We leave Stalin to fend for himself, risking a separate peace between Germany and the USSR. The US and UK then have to absorb the casualties that Stalin absorbed in order to defeat Hitler. Which alternative do you prefer? Would you suggest we should have attacked Pakistan and Afghanistan simultaneously? Should we engage in an open invasion of a nation armed with nuclear weapons? Should we declare Pakistan an enemy and leave Afghanistan alone? What are your alternatives? Give me a reasonable alternative strategy.

Elcid wrote: "OK Sanman: your turn. I happen to be very uneasy about Pakistan as "ally." But given the location of AQ in Afghanistan, the offensive there did make strategic sense (even the French seem to agree- since theirs is the second biggest air force committed). Presumably even YOU agree. What was our option if we did NOT accept Pakistan as an ally, for this campaign?" You remember that projector gadget Arnold had in Total Recall? It made it look like Arnold was in one place, whereas he was really just hiding nearby. The Taliban and fundamentalists did not originate locally from within Afghanistan, in fact they were projected into Afghanistan from outside by the Pakistani government. This was simply a continuation of the 1980s joint US-Pakistani effort to topple the Communist Kabul govt using mujahedin guerrillas. From the US point of view that war was to roll back or bleed Soviet forces, but from the Pakistani point of view it was to turn Afghanistan into a satellite state and bridgehead for fomenting deeper Islamic revolution into Just as the fallout from the US support of Iraq in its war with Iran was a regionally powerful Saddam ready to destabilize the region by invading Kuwait, similarly the fallout from the US support of Pakistan during the Afghan War was an all-powerful General Zia armed with the A-bomb and ready to spread jihad in Central and South Asia. Washington and Moscow managed to partly bail themselves out of the post-Afghan War mess by surgically assassinating the regionally ambitious Zia -- at the cost of losing a US ambassador accidentally caught in the middle. But the 2 superpowers were not able to similarly surgically clean up the mujahedin mess left to the north in Afghanistan, since that was far more messy. That left the way open for successive Pakistani regimes to continue to further inflame that cesspool until 9/11 happened. Naturally then, it's no surprise that Osama and the AlQaeda leadership are not hiding in Afghanistan, but actually in the northern part of Pakistan. For a country that wants recognition of its nuclear status, Pakistan seems to have a complete absence of control over what's happening on its own territory -- the necessary consequence of its having outsourced its military capability to religious guerrilla vigilantes. Again, countries like this would normally collapse under the weight of their own contradictions, just like Soviet Communism collapse, and yet the US still seeks to sustain these contradictory, self-destructive states with their sickly ideology. The US should allow these toxically dangerous states to collapse of their own accord based on their own unhealthy ideologies, but the US refuses to do this, because it claims that it's in the US national interest to sustain the toxic sickly regime in order to fight terrorism. The Pakistani regime is the source of the terror -- the cause of the disease and not the cure.

...Musharraf came to power because because their army is unwilling to let go from a policy of jihadist expansionism, even if it means tossing out an elected civilian govt... this statement is incorrect. The civilian government of Pakistan was extending support to a guerilla movement in one of the north-central states of India. They did this to make India thin our her forces in Kashmnir. This was a dangerous escalation of the struggle between Pakistan and India. India was contemplating very serious retaliation. Musharraf's coup put an end to this risky and destabilizing operation. ...We all know that even Musharraf is in danger of being tossed out for diverging from the jihad dream... In other words, Musharraf is an opponent of jihadism, and therefore a valuable ally.

Instead of carping about the current strategy why don't you provide alternatives. So far you have managed to criticize the US because: 1. We took limited action to influence events outside the Western Hemisphere prior to 1900 (conveniently ignoring the fact that the US had limited ability to do so) 2. We were allied with the USSR during WWII in order to defeat Germany (conveniently ignoring the 20 million deaths in Russia which were required to defeat the German Army, who was going to put up the manpower needed?) 3. We supported countries and groups which opposed the USSR in our 7 decade struggle with Bolshevism based on 20/20 hindsight. Perhaps you should reconsider those decisons based on knowledge and conditions at the time instead of a decade or more later. 4. We support a man who, at great personal risk to himself, opposes Islamic fundamentalism and extremism in his own country and supports us as we have fought the Taliban and al Qaeda. You conveniently ignore the fact that removing our support for Musharraf means destabilizing Pakistan, leading to his replacement with extremists who would have access to nuclear weapons. 5. You criticize our actions in Iraq because it is taking away from the focus on Shi'ite extremism (ignoring the fact that Wahabi extremism is at least as virulent and dangerous) although it has been shown time and again that Hussein funded and supported terrorist activity in Israel and directly against the US in Somalia, had the capability to produce WMD's, indeed was producing small quantities of them in 2002 and 2003 and had demonstrated aims of destabilizing regimes and fighting wars of aggression for more than 3 decades (don't forget Iraqi equipment, men and money participated in Yom Kippur in 1973). So, give me an alternative.