Comment Re:He had me until... (Score 1) 728
Now back to the point, of what should have been done to shut down Al Qaeda. Before the invasion they had pretty much free reign in Afghanistan, the government was happy for them to be there and they could run pretty openly. Shutting that down was necessary and a good thing. The problem was then that the focus was turned to the neocons wet dream of taking over Iraq, with the attempt to link Iraq to Al Qaeda and the whole WMD fiction. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/2859431.stm ("Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term"). This meant that the reconstruction of Afghanistan was starved of resources, it also gave North Korea a couple of years of low international attention an pressure, which mean that as long as they kept their heads down they could carry on wiht their nuclear program, resulting in a functional bomb. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction
I am really not sure what you are proposing the US does about Saudi Arabia, another invasion? The hey lets bomb mecca option, that will stop them! option (how well did the lets bomb the wtc, that will stop them! option work? ). The fact remains the Al-Sauds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Saud) are the US best friends in Saudi Arabia. I am sure they are clamping down. It is rather hard to stop wealthy individuals (and there are rather a lot of those in SA) giving cash to "islamic charities" with terrorist connections. I really don't know what you think you can acheive appart from another HUGE mess in SA. So 1/ Afghanistan was a sensible target, it was a large military base and staging ground for Al Qaeda. 2/ Iraq was for sure a distraction 3/ I have have no idea what you want to try to do in Saudi Arabia, but you would most likely make the situation worse, the government there is about as pro america as anyone in the region, and a lot more pro america than the public opinion in the country is. So any change of government is likely to result in more problems for hte US not less.