*laughing* A wierdly high number of my friends in college and grad school were linguists, Vigil....I just don't know where I went wrong. Next time, I swear I'll look you up .

I think the whole 50/50 thing is too simple a way to measure the greyness of an area. I've never liked arguments where the ends are allowed to justify the means, and I get the sticky feeling this lends itself to exactly such usages. But mostly, I've never known anything to be grey in just one dimension. In this particular case, I see ways that we could've achieved the 50% good without earning the 50% bad, so I'm just kinda confused about the logic.

Vigil, I get that you see the logic of their tactics. But their money is Saudi, and we're not doing anything about that. They safely opperate without OUR country, they don't need a willing government. They had training bases in North Africa, we've done nothing about that. They've got cells (STILL) in London and one can only presume New York, we haven't solved that. I get the logic, but I don't see the effectiveness.

Will you also grant me the logic that by using conventional warfare and a willingness to acrue civilian injuries and casualties (I WILL hit the first person to use that rediculous euphamism, you know the one) with a soggy sponge), we also give individual angry young men more of a reason to joint the organisation, and older men to fund it? Grant me simply the logic of it, and I promise I'll leave Chompsky out of it .

I keep trying to pull other examples into the discussion of this War on Terror, because ours is hardly the first. I admit that any analogy is faulty. But if you don't like England/IRA troubles (and their use of precisely our tactics took decades and eventual recognition of and negotiation with to show results, arguably the last part is inevitable if you use this approach), how about Germany/France? I'm not calling Bush a nazi, but the harder the Germans squeezed, the more people joined the French resistance. They weren't overly impressed with the "French" government Gernmany gave them despite the nominal "independence" it offered. They wanted the Germans out. Period, end of story. Their mere presence was a recruiting tool. I'll say it again, you can't win a War on Terror with the 82nd airborn. I see no evidence that the current administration's approach is working, I think they've chosen only to accept part of the logical implications of their actions.

G