Understanding terrorism

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

So Afghanistan was a mistake then?

Afghanistan was started at a time when most of the world, even many moderate Muslims, had sympathy for the US. We took advantage of that to invade a country that had a direct and certain connection to the attack on our soil that generated that sympathy. Afghanistan wasn't even remotely close to the recruiting value of Iraq.

[mrnoodle]

For those of you who get nerd boner over the whole footnoted, annotated thing in your political argyments, here's the text of an interesting presentation on the AFC, the antiwar organization in WWII that gained notoriety when its poster child, Charles Lindbergh, showed himself to be a Nazi supporter.

Some of the parallels to today's situation are striking, even though the political parties are reversed. But my favorite part was in the endnotes:

Roosevelt had told the nation during a fireside chat in December 1940 that “the Nazi masters of Germany have made it clear that they intend not only to dominate all life and thought in their own country, but also to enslave the whole of Europe, and then to use the resources of Europe to dominate the rest of the world.” Therefore “the United States had no right or reason to encourage talk of peace, until the day shall come when there is a clear intention on the part of the aggressor nations to abandon all thought of dominating or conquering the world.” He also rejected any notion of a negotiated peace, since such a peace “would be only another armistice, leading to the most gigantic armaments race and the most devastating trade war in all history. And in these contests the Americans would offer the only real resistance to the Axis powers.” Cole, Roosevelt, p. 343.

Roosevelt was a neocon! Be still my heart.