I don't recall communism killing more than 3000 American civilians on American soil. So, maybe Communism was a greater global threat, but radical islam represents a more serious domestic threat for the US.
American civilians on US soil? Maybe no: but remember the threat was actually to nuke the whole country, killing millions: that was clearly a significant threat. And overall, wars abroad against communism cost 60000 (Viet) + 40000 (Korea) = 100 000
How many victims did Radical Islam did in the last say... 10 years?
I'd say no more than 10 000 thousands, if you consider that the Iraqi civil war is not a direct result of radical islamism terrorism.
If you decide to count the iraqis then you might wanna add the civilians killed during the war against communism: then you wour easily reach millions.
Overall, although radical islamism is a threat, it is clearly a minor one, provided we deal with it in an intelligent way (ie exactly the opposit of what's been done in the last 10 years).
We are a hundred times stronger than they are. Let's not overestimate this thing. Without the war in IQ and if the Is-Pa conflict had been settled, just try to imagine how the world would be today...
If you agree, then why did you claim that "the US" (suggesting the country as a whole) believes "they hate our freedoms"?
I didn't take the time to be more precise: obviously not everybody thinks that. There are various opinions.
The analogies you offer are terrible, destroying the environment and the health service is not in the long term interest of any country. This is an act of silly and ill thought out polices. The polices behind this are not malicious. As for declaring the air was safe to work unless you can offer proof that this was a deliberately malicious act intended to injure or kill again it is a terrible analogy.
I see you are using the Iraq war analogy also. This too is a terrible analogy. You may as well just say “Look Bush and co started a war in Iraq to kill thousands of innocent people and to destroy the countries infrastructure. This was all planned out before hand and was done with intent". This then follows that anybody capable of such a wicked ,dreadful act would also be capable of murdering 3000 of there own citizens to achieve such a thing.
The war inside an Iraq, IMO is a terrible thing it has killed countess thousand of people and cost an absolute fortune but and here is the but, this was not the plan. This was never indented. I doubt you will find much support from anybody, including those who disagree with this war, that it was deliberately started to achieve these precise things. So this again goes back to the point of intent. And this is where the LIHOP fails for this to be true there has to be intent. There is no way round it.
For anybody to allow 911 to have happened on purpose then these has to be an intention, a willingness to see destruction and death brought on your own country.
Despite all you may think of the war in Iraq, and I actually don't support it, it was never the intent on invading this country to kill thousands and bring it to the brink of civil war. Although this has happened, it has happened because there never was any correctly thought out exit strategy or what would happen once the fighting had stopped, which only lasted a very short time. And here in lies the massive difference between LIHOP and the Iraq war. The consequences of the invasion of Iraq could never have in visualised and were not intended. The consequences of LIHOP could be visualised and would have been indended.
No Busherie there is no worse crime than allowing terrorists to board four planes and slaughter thousands of your own citizens because if this really happened then it happened not because somebody got it all wrong but because somebody indented it to happen. Somebody, somewhere seriously sat down and thought it all out, knowing that by doing nothing thousands of their own citizens would die, intentionally.
It is not just simply and purely wrong, it is called genocide, and this is what LIHOP is.
1. Stateoggrace, I think that you have been misled by Bush and Rusmfeld, about the "Zero K" wars: Wars kill people, that's it. There are "collateral damage", there are solders dying, people die. When you decide to start a war, you know people are gonna die. That's why international law forbid starting war, unless they are meant to counter a direct threat to your country. That was not the case, the neocons knew it, and still they started the war. Now people die.
When they started it, they already knew that people, including their soldiers, were going to die. So why can't you conceive that some of them let civilians die for what they thought was the greater interest of the country?
2. Another precision: genocide is something very particular, and though it's hard to define, it's cannot be used except in certain contexts. Wiki definition:
"Genocide is the mass killing of a group of people as defined by Article 2 of the
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life,
calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
3. EPA and the decision to declare the air safe. It's obvious they decided to lie about the risks in order to get the city (and Wall Street in particualr) back to work:
September 16, 2001
The EPA and OSHA release a joint statement asserting that the air in downtown New York City is safe to breathe. “[N]ew samples confirm previous reports that ambient air quality meets OSHA standards and consequently is not a cause for public concern,” the agencies claim. [Environmental Protection Agency, 9/16/2001] But it is later learned that the press release had been heavily edited under pressure from the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). Critical passages in the original draft were either deleted or modified to downplay public health risks posed by contaminants that were released into the air during the collapse of the World Trade Center. [Environmental Protection Agency, 8/21/2003
; Newsday, 8/26/2003]
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?entity=environmental_protection_agency
So overall, you need to ask yourself: can my government have decided to some of us should die, that our country should be damaged, to wake America up, after all these years of Clinton liberalism, so that America can prevail in the 21st century?
Look at all the warnings, the meetings with Clarke, the meeting with Tenet, and ask yourself: is it possible that Rice, Cheney and a few others decided to ignore the AQ threat, even though they knew that people were going to die?
B