Re: a trial in the Hague... the fact of the matter is, you cannot guarantee an "impartial" jury ANYWHERE now. Period.
Let me clarify something. I live in Fairfax, Virginia. I work in Tyson's Corner, Virginia. Both are roughly 25 minutes from downtown Washington, D.C. Being a large government contractor, we have people that were in the Pentagon that day. A man I know, who worked in my building, was killed that day at the Pentagon. He lived in Fairfax. He has a four year old son and a wife that he's left behind. It could have been me. It could have been someone I work with that I know better than I knew Khang. I am close enough to Washington that a powerful enough attack could very easily cause harm or death to someone I know or love. Or me.
Now, I said that to illustrate the seriousness of this situation. There may come a day in the future where I drop off the Cellar. And you read in the news that a surface nuke went off at Tyson's Corner Center, the ritziest mall in Fairfax County, the wealthiest county in the country. They picked it to strike more fear into the average American - a big mall, but not a likely target. Not wholly unlikely either.
And all of a sudden, I'm gone. And so are thousands of people around me. Jenni works
in Tyson's.
Maybe we're gone because we didn't fight back. Maybe the person that detonated that nuclear device would have been "neutralized" had a US jet dropped a bunker buster on an underground shelter some place in Afghanistan.
But we can't, 'cause we're not at war, right? That's what I hear some people saying. It's not a war. The enemy isn't defined.
Well, I sure as hell did hear Osama bin Laden calling for a jihad against Americans. ..."seek out and kill Americans, where ever they are." That, to me, indicates pretty explicitly that we are at war, our enemy defined - those who wage war on us.
Know that we didn't ask for this. Though our backing of Israel may, at times, be a bit extreme, the majority of the United States citizenship has nothing to do with this.
Laura Angiletta didn't kill any Palestinians. She wasn't occupying Saudi soil. Look at that picture. Click that link. She's cute, isn't she? Her status got upgraded from "Reported Missing" to "Confirmed Dead" not too long ago.
For no good reason.
We fight this war against a defined enemy. We're not striking back and ending up with two broken noses. We're striking back because Laura Angiletta's body didn't become a mangled corpse for nothing.
To put it another way: if we strike back, we will be attacked. If we don't strike back, we will be attacked. Maybe this way we can keep mine, or Jenni's, or Donald's corpse from becoming a decomposing heap of meat in a month old pile of rubble. And while we're at it, we'll try real hard to keep that whole "pursuit of happiness" thing going too... I know I don't want my kids growing up in fear because we let the whole world know that we'll take it lying down.
When a man knows he can beat his wife, he will do it with impunity. When a man hits his wife and she clubs him in the head with a baseball bat, he may think twice about doing it next time.
Finally... a ground war on mainland Japan was avoided by dropping a Big Fucking Bomb. Lives were saved. Do you honestly doubt that this will turn out any other way?