What is your solution for Afghanistan?

-- bernbart

When 9-11 occured the response was not to consider it a crime scene, but to assume, without questioning that assumption, that it was an act of war and that certain foreign countries needed to be invaded to prevent any such similar future occurance. So, we were persuaded to invade and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq. One different course of action, one different from what Brooks advocated, would have been to treat the events of 9-11 as the crime that it was.

The implications of that would have been to set up a truly independent investigation in order to prosecute the leads and exonerate the innocent.

One problem we have with Afghanistan is that it is not clear that the people of that country should have been made to suffer from our military for the possible and not proven crimes of outsiders living there.

Another problem is that by not mounting a truly independent and effective investigation of the 9-11 murders and its trail of clues, we can never be sure our own government was not involved in some way.

So, yes, there were better more effective responses to 9-11 that did not go where Brooks wanted us to go, and we will continue to suffer from our refusal to pursue them.

The option of criminal investigation still lies open to us.

I take it that the point of your documenting the differences between the EU report on the Georgia/Russia conflict and what American politicians and media stars said, was to point out that they disagreed about the conclusions. The EU studied the events and blamed Georgia, whereas, the Americans blamed Russia.

It also seemed to me that the Americans willingness to blame the Russians was not very much related to their understanding of the facts. The Russians did it because they are known aggressors!!!...

IT is interesting to me that the response to this conflict in America can be related to our conflict with Iran going on currently. I suspect the anger and emotional responses to Iran's recent reports about its hidden facilities and its missle testing have some value for people in themselves. The emotional fact-independent response to what the Russians or the Iranians do is that easily understood not going against the grain kind of position that, apparently, does not need facts to promote.

I suspect the media's and politician's reliance on these stories about our 'enemies' supports the claim that our country's policies and behavior is determined more by our mythologies about the world than by looking at what the facts might be.

I also suspect that the claim that your criticisms of our tortuters only make sense from "30,000 feet" would have some comparable phrase in this case. To the politicians and media stars the demand that policy be fact-based only makes sense in the ivory-tower, from "30,000 feet," or by armchair bloggers.