[BruceZ]

This is absurd on two levels: (1) there's no "them" defined, so it makes as much sense as saying "look what they did to us with anthrax, what they did at Pearl Harbor, what they did to Custer;"


"Them" refers to international terrorism by which we are currently threatened, not the Japanese nor the American Indians. I thought that was abundantly clear. If it wasn't clear to you, then I fail to see how you would have any credibility at all in any other analyses of this issue. If it was clear to you (which I actually think it was) then it is you who is offering an absurd argument solely for the purpose of advancing your cause, rather than arguing an issue on its merits.

(2) in the second sentence, you are effectively admitting that there is no reason to believe that invading Iraq will have any effect on terrorism. You could just as easily say "if we invade Iraq, they can certainly do that again or even worse." Moreover, you and Bush are both ducking the issue of whether the rage ignited by invading Iraq will exacerbate the inclination toward terrorism to the point where it overwhelms any ability to reduce the ability of terrorists to operate, accepting the dubious assumption that we can do even that.


In the first place, I'm not saying or ducking anything, I am interpreting Bush's comments to those who apparently had trouble understanding them. I thought I made that clear. In the second place, your statement is completly incorrect logically. You are saying effectively:

<font color="red">"If we invade they may attack us, and if we don't invade they can certainly attack us worse."</font color>

Is equivalent to:

<font color="red">"If we invade they can certainly attack us worse."</font color>

and we can deduce from this

<font color="red">"There is no reason to believe that invading Iraq will have any effect on terrorism."</font color>

Think about these assertions some more and see if you can't find the errors on your own. I can't teach a course in formal logic here on the other topics forum. I will tell you that this is incorrect in a very fundamental way. If this is representative of your thinking, then I would suspect that your arguments would carry very little weight at all until this is corrected.