[no subject]

> They "publically expressed outrage"?  Was this before or after
> they stated that a religious court should judge him, and we
> should accept the outcome, if the activist zealots of the same
> stripe as Osama bin Laden found in his favor?

Umm, the last statement I heard was that they would not hand him over, but
requested that he leave their territory. That's not showing support for
him, that's turning their back on him, but that's as strong a statement as
they can make publically given their own internal political situation. They
did publically express outrage in fact; the very first public statement
they made was to express sympathy for the US.
  
>> This sounds a lot like the traditional hostage situation... only
>> now, the United States is holding an ENTIRE COUNTRY hostage.
> 
> This is a gross misrepresentation of the situation.  The U.S.
> is in no way acting as terrorists: terrorists bomb first, and
> claim credit afterwards -- assuming that they don't say to
> themselves "Oh shit... I've stepped in it this time...".
 
The IRA generally issued warnings before bombings so that casualties were
minimised. Though they still killed plenty of innocent people it could have
been a lot higher.

The US approach isn't that different and the IRA would definitely be
considered to be terrorists. While on the subject of the IRA, a lot of the
finance came from the US, so if you accept the current US thinking then the
UK should have invaded the US for aiding and abetting the IRA over all
those  years. The US, until Clinton got involved, turned a blind eye to the
Irish situation because a lot of US Irish were sympathisers. That was
apparently an "acceptable" struggle being waged.

Terrorism is not some black or white issue. It's a manifestation of
underlying politics. It's hypocritical of the US to wage war on terrorism
at this point given that it has participated and supported it in the past,
as long as it wasn't on their doorstep.

Did the US express outrage and decide to wage a war on terrorism when the
IRA blew up the hotel that the UK govt were staying in at the time, or when
they killed a member of our royal family, or when they carried out a mortar
attack on the MI5 HQ?

Did the UK decide to wage war on innocent countries when faced with such
provocation?

There needs to be a reasoned response to this attack, and declaring war on
countries because some of their residents are suspected of being involved
is not a reasonable response. It's more a symptom of the foreign policy the
US has had for many years which led to the terrorist attack in the first
place. i.e. do what we want or we will send the boys around.

Incidentally, the support in the west for US action is flimsy. The EU was
very guarded in it's support yesterday. While the UK may be gung ho about
supporting the US that is not reflected across the whole of Europe. No-one
is going to stand up and not support US action, but there's growing feeling
that the US will not be given open-ended support to do whatever it wishes.

There are many countries on the fringes of the EU that will be very worried
about US retaliation, countries like Turkey for example.

Paul Richards

To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx
with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message