US Involvement in Iraq Began after 1993

[Berzerker]

The following exchange is from Connected Coast to Coast on MSNBC (from memory)

Monica Crowley - Al Qaeda began attacking the US in '93 before US involvement in Iraq.

Guest - What year was the first Gulf War?

Monica - 1991

Guest - Just checking to see if you had your facts right.

Monica - I do, Al Qaeda was attacking the US before US involvement in Iraq.

----------------------------------------------------------------

This exchange was a result of an Arab guest "Blaming America First"... He tried to point out how western policies in the ME have been upsetting Arabs for a long time, the double standard wrt Israel, western support for brutal dictators in the ME, British colonialism in Iraq, etc...

The other night Bill O'Reilly read an email from a skeptical viewer who warned against smacking a hornet's nest with a stick, an analogy I've used before to describe how we found ourselves in this mess. O'Reilly responded rhetorically: the hornet's are trying to take over the yard. Again, a statement that would have us believe the US and the west was just minding their own business when Al Qaeda woke up one day and decided to attack us.


I say we divide the country up into globalists and isolationists, the globalists seem clueless (or just downright deceitful) and they're getting Americans (and westerners) killed and denying they ever had anything to do with the chain reaction of events. No wonder these people dont want to know why the US is hated, we might start blaming them and their foreign policies - thats what it means to blame America first. They are America, not us little people. If we hold them accountable for the consequences of their policies, we're blaming America. So we can't hold them accountable, and the hate from people who see our hypocrisy grows.

[DRoseDARs]

Well, somewhere in her inane comments is a bit of truth. bin Laden founded what would become al Qaeda in '88 per Wikipedia. Beyond that, she's just being a bubble head. Good on her guest for pointing that out.

[DRoseDARs]

Though, bin Laden having a time machine is kind of a scary thought...

[Kuciwalker]

Re: US Involvement in Iraq Began after 1993

Actually I'm pretty sure the Gulf War was prior to '93.

[DRoseDARs]

Re: Re: US Involvement in Iraq Began after 1993

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
Actually I'm pretty sure the Gulf War was prior to '93.

Thank you Mr. States-The-Already-Stated-In-The-Original-Postiwalker.

[Kuciwalker]

You think I read OPs?

[Berzerker]

True, Al Qaeda goes back into the late 80s when the Russkies were in Afghanistan. We became the new target after the first gulf war when we kept our troops in Saudi Arabia instead of leaving. Didn't we learn anything from the '83 attack in Beirut? Reagan learned, he withdrew the troops.

[MichaeltheGreat]

And gave the mother****ers a sense that they could attack us and push us back.

AQ isn't going to magically go away if we're no longer in the middle east. They will only pause while attempting to establish jihadist states there, and then move on.

Read al Qutb and al Maududi. This is a global fight to the finish, nothing more and nothing less.

[MrFun]

MTG might be right on this one -- Western nations used to think that Hitler was only interested in strengthening German sovreignty in the 1930s.

Boy were they proven wrong . . . . . .

[Imran Siddiqui]

GODWIN!

Wait... that was a good point.. nevermind .

[Imran Siddiqui]

Thought this article would be interesting for the discussion .

Why are they killing us?
Posted: July 13, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern

By Patrick J. Buchanan
© 2005 Creators Syndicate Inc.

Who carried out the London massacre, we do not know. But, as to why they did it, we are already quarreling.

President Bush says that the terrorists are attacking our civilization. At Fort Bragg, N.C., he explained again why we are fighting in Iraq, two years after we overthrew Saddam Hussein. "Iraq is the latest battlefield in this war," he said, in "a global war on terror."

"Many terrorists who kill ... on the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of citizens in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. There is only one course of action against them: to defeat them abroad before they attack us at home."

Bush was echoed by Sen. John McCain. Those terrorists in Iraq, McCain told Larry King, "are the same guys who would be in New York if we don't win." We fight the terrorists over there so we do not have to fight them over here.

But is this true?

Few Americans have given more thought to the motivation of suicide-bombers than Robert Pape, author of "Dying to Win: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism." His book is drawn from an immense database on every suicide-bomb attack from 1980 to early 2004. Conclusion: The claim that 9-11 and the suicide-bombings in Iraq are done to advance some jihad by "Islamofascists" against the West is not only unsubstantiated, it is hollow.

"Islamic fundamentalism is not as closely associated with suicide terrorism as many people think," Pape tells the American Conservative in its July 18 issue. Indeed, the world's leader in suicide terror was the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka. This secular Marxist group "invented the famous suicide vest for their suicide assassination of Rajiv Ghandi in May 1991. The Palestinians got the idea of the vest from the Tamil Tigers."

But if the aim of suicide bombers is not to advance Islamism in a war of civilizations, what is its purpose? Pape's conclusion:

[S]uicide-terrorist attacks are not so much driven by religion as by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide terrorist campaign – over 95 percent of all incidents – has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.

The 9-11 terrorists were over here because we were over there. They are not trying to convert us. They are killing us to drive us out of their countries.

Before the U.S. invasion, says Pape, "Iraq never had a suicide attack in its history. Since our invasion, suicide terrorism has been escalating rapidly, with 20 attacks in 2003, 48 in 2004 and over 50 in just the first five months of 2005. Every year since the U.S. invasion, suicide terrorism has doubled ... Far from making us safer against terrorism, the operation in Iraq has stimulated suicide terrorists and has given suicide terrorism a new lease on life."

Pape is saying that President Bush has got it backward: The Iraq war is not eradicating terrorism, it is creating terrorists.

The good news? "The history of the last 20 years" shows that once the troops of the occupying democracies "withdraw from the homeland of the terrorists, they often stop – and stop on a dime."

Between 1982 and 1986, there were 41 suicide-bomb attacks on U.S., French, and Israeli targets in Lebanon. When U.S. and French troops withdrew and Israel pulled back to a six-mile buffer zone, suicide-bombings virtually ceased. When the Israelis left Lebanon, the Lebanese suicide-bombers did not follow them to Tel Aviv.

"Since suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation and not Islamic fundamentalism," says Pape, "the use of heavy military force to transform Muslim societies ... is only likely to increase the number of suicide terrorists coming at us."

What Pape is saying is that the neocons' "World War IV" – our invading Islamic countries to overthrow regimes and convert them into democracies – is suicidal, like stomping on an anthill so as not to be bitten by ants. It is the presence of U.S. troops in Islamic lands that is the progenitor of suicide terrorism.

Bush's cure for terrorism is a cause of the epidemic. The doctor is spreading the disease. The longer we stay in Iraq, the greater the number of suicide attacks we can expect. The sooner we get our troops out, the sooner terrorism over there and over here will end. So Pape says the data proves. This is the precise opposite of what George Bush argues and believes.

How would we defend our vital interests in the Gulf?

Answers Pape: As we did in the 1970s and 1980s. By getting our troops out, removing the cause of suicide-terror, leaving behind stocked bases and putting U.S. carrier and air forces over the horizon to ensure the Gulf oil flows. But unless and until American troops are withdrawn from the Middle East, the suicide attacks continue.

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=45259

I found the studies made by the referenced book to be quite interesting.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
GODWIN!

Wait... that was a good point.. nevermind .

You have made a good effort in this instance to control your knee-jerk impulses.

[Berzerker]

His knee jerk impulse was to say you had a good point, a point he proceeded to think about, then refute

AQ isn't going to magically go away if we're no longer in the middle east. They will only pause while attempting to establish jihadist states there, and then move on.

And how many adherents will they have if we leave? Better yet, how many would they have if we never invaded? Thats the lesson we should have learned in Vietnam, but we left and they didnt bring the war to our shores. I do see the rationale for placing a terrorist magnet in Iraq, but that rationale is based upon a long term or "permanent" military presence in the ME. I think the goal is regime change in Iran and Syria.

Anyway, I dont care much about what someone wrote, we don't invade other people's countries based on the notion some religious guys wrote about their desire to conquer the world for Allah. If they try, then we act in self-defense. The notion that we should invade countries half way around the world to prevent them from invading us is self-fulfilling. Looking at the results of a flawed policy to justify the policy is illogical. And I dont buy that argument, these people would not have come here to bomb us if we had never spent 5 decades in their lands. I dont know if they'd still launch attacks if we left, but this I do know, the longer we're there we are creating enough hatred to send lots of fencesitters onto the battlefield and if this drags out and we're still over there, one day these bastards will cause alot of damage to a major city.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Berzerker
His knee jerk impulse was to say you had a good point, a point he proceeded to think about, then refute

No -- his almost knee-jerk response was to lump all Nazi Germany references as simply being Godwin, regardless of the context of the argument, or the legitimacy of any analogy.

[Zevico]

The presence of US troops in the Middle East has nothing to do with terror attacks against the US. It is in essence the West and its apparent ills that Islamic Fundamentalists despise and is the cause of their attacks upon us. As fanatics of any type, they are willing to do anything for their cause, suicide bombing included. Consider that the US and Saudi Arabia were supposedly in alliance for the duration of the Gulf War and afterwards. Consider that hatred from the US stems mostly from the government controlled media in that country and its racist educational system--and that this system existed prior to the US presence and continued after it. What possible cause could the Islamic Fundamentalists have had for preaching against the US--barring the obvious differences in morality between them--prior to the presence of US troops there?

[question--how exactly was the US in ME for 5 decades with troops? No sarcasm meant, I checked on Wiki and googled it but afaik wasn't the US' first military presence there only in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia during 80's/90's?]

One may state that Israel is the cause of this hatred, then, or rather the United States' support of it. Well, to be more precise, Islamic Fundamentalists oppose Israel's existence, and likewise so do fundamentalist/dictatorial countries such as Saudi Arabia in the Middle East. Their proposed peace treaty is meaningless in this regard, because it relies upon the Right of Return being recognised--an act that would in effect cause Israel to cease to exist. If you believe that the United States should not support Israel's right to existence, well then I can't argue with you.

If you believe the United States should be more harsh towards Israel due to its treatment of the Palestinians (which, I assume, you find unacceptable), then fair enough--I would agree with you if I thought its treatment of them unacceptable given the present situation.

But I would remind you that this would be held as ultimately irrelevant by Islamic Fundamentalists, who simply do not want Israel to exist. Because their tirades and propaganda against Israel and America do not for the most part rely on actual events and occurrences but rather on rumour and outright lies, their effect upon Arabs [if any] would remain unchanged should America 'clamp down' on Israel.