[Barry the Sprout]

I hate to resurrect this discussion but I am not sure I agree with the last post by Gaelic. The Taliban did offer to hand Bin Laden to a nuetral country. If the US et al had just have let it stand at that and bought him to trial there then a lot of people would still be alive. Also we wouldn't have 4 million people abandoning their homes.

History appears to have taught us that stamping down on terrorism just earns you a sore foot. The IRA and the PKP are both cases in point. A shoot to kill policy on the IRA just increased membership and activity. Everytime a tank rolls into the Gaza Strip the PKP just get more stones and go and throw them at Israeli soldiers. I know that in both of these cases there were different objectives for the terrorists than Al-Queda have, but the same logic applies to how we deal with them. Just because they do not share objectives with the IRA doesn't mean they won't get angry if we shoot them. By attempting to wipe out this generation of terrorists we are creating a new one right in front of our eyes. There is no deterrant with Al-Queda. They will gladly die for their cause. And even if the objective is to wipe out every member how do you expect to do that? As has been said time and agian, they are not stupid by a long way.

There was a rather gruesome cartoon in Private Eye this week. A bit of a mickey-take on "Wheres Waldo?" called "Wheres Osama?". The picture was of an Afghan village with lots of people and the caption was:
"Can you find Osama without killing everyone in the picture?".

Now, I don't know if we can. But I don't really want to try it for myself to be honest. As I said at the top, there were other ways of solving this that didn't kill people.