Are you fucking serious TA? You're going with Santorum's, "they hate us for our freedoms" bullshit.... This booing only goes to show the portion of neocons that are alive and well in the GOP along with the segment of the tea party that were taken over by neocons.
READ IT...
By Pat Buchanan
"We are at war. We are at war against al-Qaida, a far-reaching network of violence and hatred that attacked us on 9/11, that killed nearly 3,000 innocent people and that is plotting to strike us again."
Thus did Barack Obama clear the air as to whether we are at war, and with whom and why.
After his remarks, Helen Thomas during a White House briefing asked a follow-up question to which we almost never hear an answer:
Why is al-Qaida at war with us? What is its motivation?
It was Osama bin Laden himself, in his declaration of war in 1998, published in London, who gave al-Qaida's reasons for war:
First, the U.S. military presence on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia. Second, U.S. sanctions causing terrible suffering among the Iraqi people. Third, U.S. support for Israel's dispossession of the Palestinians.
To Osama, we started the war. Muslims, the ulema, must fight because America, with her "brutal crusade occupation of the (Arabian) Peninsula" and support for "the Jews' petty state" and "occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there," was waging war upon the Islamic world.
Terrorism is al-Qaida's unconventional tactic, but its war aims are quite conventional.
Al-Qaida is fighting a religious war against apostates and pagans in their midst. On Sept. 11, they were over here -- because we are over there.
Nothing justifies the massacre of Sept. 11. But these are the political goals behind the 9/11 attack, and this is why Islamists fare well in elections in the Middle East. Tens of millions of Muslims, who may despise terrorism, identify with the causes for which Osama declared war.
Consider. America lost 4,000 soldiers in six years in Iraq, with 30,000 wounded. Yet not one American of the 125,000 soldiers in Iraq was killed in December. Why not? Because we no longer conduct raids, patrol streets, kick down doors and pat down suspects. We have ended our combat operations, withdrawn to desert bases and seem anxious to go home. When we stopped fighting and killing them, they stopped fighting and killing us.
According to Gen. Barry McCaffrey, we must now prepare for 300 to 500 dead and wounded every month in Afghanistan by summer.
Why are the Taliban killing our soldiers? Because we threw them out of power, took over their country and imposed the Hamid Karzai regime. And our troops, some 100,000 by fall, are the force preventing them from recapturing their country. We will bleed in Afghanistan as long as we are in Afghanistan.
But if, as Obama said, "we are at war with al-Qaida," why are we fighting the Taliban when al-Qaida is in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and North Africa?
Hezbollah has used terrorism but not against us since the bombing of a Marine barracks a quarter-century ago. And our Marines were attacked in Lebanon because we were in Lebanon, intervening in their civil-sectarian war. Had the Marines not been sent into the midst of that war, they would not have been targeted.
When Ronald Reagan withdrew them, the attacks stopped.
As long as we take sides in Muslim wars, those we fight and kill over there will come to kill us over here. This is payback for our intervention. This is the price of empire. This is the cost of the long war.
Pat Buchanan is the author of "Churchill, Hitler and 'The Unnecessary War.'"
Read more: Why they are at war with us - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/s_661831.html#ixzz1XoKi4Dvt
