Yes. It could.

Yeah, it could.

Now maybe we could all sit down and ask ourselves what has been DONE in the last two years of "strong determined leadership" that would prevent it. And maybe we could ask ourselves just WHAT any of the people who have so occupied our attention for the past few days have stated about what they will DO to prevent it.

Simple Joseph. They have KILLED a number of these animals, and will KILL more of them, and keep KILLING these bastards until they decide to leave the dark ages. In the words of Samuel L. Jackson: "Yes, they deserved to die, and I hope they burn in Hell!"

yeah, Joseph, bunches and bunches of terrorists have been sent to oblivion by US Marines, US Soldiers, USAF and Navy pilots both in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Pakistanis are helping us, the Brits are helping us and lots of other countries police are helping us. We're gonna get more of 'em too. If you think the fight will end on June the 00th, 200?, you're impatiently unreasonably expecting an impossible assurance. We will fight a long time to end this but the strongest, smartest, most determined people (Americans) will fight this to the finish even if it isn't fast enough for you.

Well, gee, ask an intelligent question, get a brainless answer.

What has been missing from my good friends of the opposite political persuasion, since at least the battle of Tora Bora, is any sense of realism about results.

I want results, not just 20,000 dead Iraqis, Afghanis, Chechnians, Palestinians, and so forth. I want results, not just whistle-blowing, siren-running "terror alerts" every time MI-5 finds somebody with bomb cookbooks and maps of downtown Manhattan and the FBI finds nobody at all. I want results, not this constant squeezing of my adrenal glands with empty rhetoric with no concrete policies behind it.

And if anyone else is willing to sit down and think hard about this horrible Russian tragedy, instead of just foaming about it, you might suddenly find that you want results too.

You GET results through policy, through actually proposing stuff to DO, and then doing it. There are any number of concrete, specific dangers that real, proactive, policy might take care of if whoever is President, now or in January, would simply start doing it.

But I won't hold my breath.

I imagine most people here remember Patton, the movie that is?

We are not going to hold on to anything exept the enemy! We are going to hold them by the nose and we are going to kick them in the ass! We are going to use their intestines to grease the treads of our tanks! We are going to murder those lousy bastards, by the bushel!

Excellent words of his!

They and us are in complete agreement. They want to die as martyrs to get those 72 virgins, and we have no problem killing them to send them to their 'paradise', as well. I see a perfect solution, does not everyone? I am afraid those terrorists are going to find paradise a bit on the warm side, and no virgins, either!

Sorry Joseph, I thought you wanted results, no some psychobable bullshit. Maybe we should invite Osama over for tea, and discuss what the root causes are. Maybe we can offer him a blood sacrifice of a few thousand school children to make his poor little ego feel better.

On second thought, I like the policy I refered to earlier. Root them out, crush them, and continue to do so until they decide to give up their noble strugle against those dangerous school children and office workers in towers. And that is the only policy I want to see done. Why don't you enlighten us to your policy idea? What do you think will stop it, since you don't want to destroy them?

As many issues as I have with the current administration. When President Bush stands there and says "Since that day, I wake up every morning thinking about how to better protect our country. I will never relent in defending America whatever it takes."
I believe him.
I can't stand how he plays some political games, I can't stand the fact he signs everything across his desk, including the 1st admendment gutting campain finance reform, the list goes on...
But when I wake up every morning and get to play video games with my daughter and rest a little easier knowing that Bush has got my back, well that makes it a better world.

Joeseph you talk about results, and you talk and talk.
I will offer some suggestions:
Racial profiling, we need to loose that Political Correctness that has been handcuffing us.
Shut the borders, no reason to stop legal immigration I am not in support for isolationism.
lets get a tad radical here, "Live free or die" should be a law

Sure. The first order of business is to recognize that we can't possibly kill everybody who potentially hates us or might harm us. We are speaking literally of hundreds of millions of people spread across half the globe. Even if we tried it would take more time than we have.

Having recognized that, we need to understand that the best shot we have at protecting ourselves in the short term is control of access here at home.

Nuclear facilities, chemical plants, seaborne containers, truckbound shipping, supplies of fertilizer and the various gunpowders (the bomb makers dream), and our very borders are access seives at the moment. How do we fix this? Money and manpower.

In the intermediate term, we have to put our full effort into coralling the surplus nuclear weapons problem, particularly in Russia. As matters now stand, the planning is to clean it all up in TEN YEARS. I don't think we have ten years. More money and much more effort is needed here.

In the long term we must confront the reality that an Islamic Fundamentalist nuclear power is highly likely to happen very soon--either in Iran or Pakistan--and we'd better have the 80% of our military ready to meet it, no matter what "nationbuilding" chores they have to foreshorten to be so. In other words, we may simply have to eat the massive strategic blunders that have tied the majority of our fighting men down.

Now I'm not going further because I'm not that interested in waving a partisan flag on this one.
Results are something we need to demand from BOTH parties, if we are going to get them.

But I will say one thing that cannot but be politically provocative, but must be said. Terrorism runs on money. We may have to make the ultimate sacrifice of our entire financial privacy to ultimately stop it.

Azrael, I would love to invite Osama over for tea and discuss the root causes, provided his is poisoned.

A reorganized intelligence service is in the making (and many suggestions for change from the 9/11 commission report are being studied and under consideration). That change is designed to provide better intelligence and identification of would be terrorists among us. Looking for terrorists is potentially hampered by civil libertarians who are incessently shouting that losing any smidgeon of liberty is not worth finding the terrorists hiding here. Sound familiar?

The suggestion that we close our borders brings cries of "fortress America" and "it's impossible" and PC thought policy limits our scrutiny of airplane passengers to only 2 Arabs per flight. Sound familiar?

100s of millions of people hate us across the globe. Really? Are all those people terrorists poised to invade us under cover and blow up our institutions? I don't think so. There is no plan or need to kill an obscene number of people because they hate us. Even Iran has a fanatical government who constantly preach hatred towards the US but a huge percentage of citizens who are itching to throw them out. And they will. The terrorists who hate the West have focused on inflicting terrorism in places around the world that they can actually get to, not the US. Sure they are not giving up and are testing our limits continually.

I don't think that a large army is a deterrent against nuclear attack. Distance alone is a deterrent at least at this stage of development. Our huge nuclear arsenal is as good a deterrent against Iran or Pakistan as it was against the Russians. The best way to increase the likelihood of terrorist attack here would be to abandon Iraq before it is strong enough to be the "nation". A few more years will tell us if that will be a reality.

I believe that a lot is being done and several policies are being developed that will increase our security against terrorism. It's a process not a miraculous event. It's too bad that terror alerts seem to bother so many. They do not bother me in the least. I welcome them. I know that our security institutions are paying attention and that they are warning us as they should even though all the details of the reasons for the alert can not be revealed lest we undermine our sources of information.

The good guys are Russian and the bad guys are Chechen?
Is only one side murdering civilians?
Who is for democracy ,who is for freedom ,
who?
How long has this carnage been going on?
Is the blood ankle , knee , waist deep?

joseph marshall,

Your (intellectual and moral )integrity has taken a serious hit today unfortunately because of your own bias and commentary that comes seemingly from a tape of bias that plays in your head and shows up in your comments. That it very tragic. Unfortunately not nearly as tragic as the events in Beslan-- the people of whom can now unfortunately proclaim their own 911. Only this time its their 903.

Kindly give us your specific suggestions on how YOU would have formulated the specific policies
that the russians would have used to have prevented this 903.

The good guys are Russian and the bad guys are Chechen?
Is only one side murdering civilians?
Who is for democracy ,who is for freedom ,
who?
How long has this carnage been going on?
Is the blood ankle , knee , waist deep?

The bad guys are the terrorists that enter an elementary school intent on and successfully KILLING CHILDREN!

I no longer give a shit about their fucking plight. Your cause loses all sympathy when you willfully kill and terrorize innocent people. Going after children is particularly despicable. Fuck them.

This civil war has been going on for years.
What is it about?
Is this school incident the worst of it?
Does one side have a monopoly of
savage inhumanity towards civilians?
Who has clean hands in this conflict?

Well, Catch 22, I can't address what problems you seem to have with my "intellectual and moral integrity" until you make clearer what they are.

As to the Russians, I don't know their security problems enough to form an opinion about what they should have done. All I can do is express my opinion about what WE should do, which I have.

If you have better suggestions about what WE should do, please post them.

Ro you are so right on. ANYONE who is cowardly enough to use an innocent child as a shield loses ALL their credibility for their cause. Adnit it folks, that's pretty low.

Explitive's brain is wired differently than normal peoples' No decent person finds it necessary to blame anyone other than the actual killers when they voluntarily take the lives of hundreds of small children. Doing ANYTHING to get your own way is barbarism. There is no provokation that justifies this loss of life, the deliberate murder of innocent children. It is man's natural instinct to protect the young. Only twisted perverted minds could do this. Nothing done to Chechnyans in the past nullifies their hideous guilt in these murders.

Well, Jane, what I would suggest is that intelligence is only one half of the problem. Insofar as snooping around, here and abroad, can be done, it is probably being done. I'm not quite sure what more you would ask of it that civil libertarians are preventing.

The difficulty from this side is that nobody goes around with "terrorist" tatooed on their forehead, so the only way to be absolutely sure of "killing all the terrorists" is to leave no one who might be one left alive. This is why a policy focused only on how many are killed is inadequate.

This is also why the rant about "more racial profiling" also makes no sense to me. The largest Muslim ethnic group in my town is Somali rather than Semitic and often indistinguishable from African-Americans in any crowd. What good would "racial profiling" do here?

And even then are we going to assign every Muslim individual in the United States their own private FBI agent? I think "interviews" are probably already yielding the maximum intelligence that they can.

The other half of the problem is "security" around the targets, including our borders. There is no question that manpower and money, far more than we now spend, would be needed to make a dent in this. But a start has to be made, so why not now? And why not come clean to all of us about the real sacrifices that would be needed to do it?

Finally, the nuclear threat has many more dimensions than "deterrance". For example, should we invoke the Bush Doctrine and invade Iran before it can go nuclear? Maybe. But if you study how strapped our troops are now, it is clear that, whether or not we should, at the moment, we can't! We simply don't have the troops available and won't have until Iraq is far more stable than it is now.

Also, if one of these attempts to kill Pervez Musharraf suceeds, what do we do about Pakistan's nukes and the possiblity of one falling into terrorist hands? Can we do anything? I don't know. But I'm certain we should be asking the question now instead of when it happens, and asking it of whoever is leading us.

More generally, I think it incumbent on all of us to start really thinking harder about what might be done. There is no question while something like what has taken place in Russia is much less likely here, it isn't impossible, and now is the time to think seriously about how to forestall it.

Hey Marshall, you lefty asshat fucktard, face reality. Islam is an insane death cult, a breeding ground for millions of Ted Bundys and Charley Mansons. Distasteful to contemplate, but when a swamp is breeding a fatal disease, YOU DRAIN THE SWAMP. End Islam--KILL THEM ALL. Stop killing the scumbags on a retail basis with ground troops. Start by nuking Mecca, Qom, Damascus, all the other Islamic cities. Then cluster bombs. Rinse and repeat.

The first order of business is to recognize that we can't possibly kill everybody who potentially hates us or might harm us.

Well, actually, we can. Better to work on how we avoid that. You make some good points in that post. However I strongly disagree with you that we haven't achieved results. That terrorist attacks are occurring elsewhere than the US reinforces my point.

I suppose the last two posts can be subsumed under the vision of conservatism as a "big tent".

The President has recently made the following remark:

"As the citizens of Afghanistan and Iraq seize the moment, their example will send a message of hope throughout a vital region. Palestinians will hear the message that democracy and reform are within their reach, and so is peace with our good friend Israel."

This does strike me as a little inconsistent with "rinse and repeat".

As for results, I would be perfectly willing to concede that the terrorists are in a far worse position now than immediately after 9/11. We have won several important battles in this war.

However, the key issue in winning this war remains the same: how do we stop the creation of an Islamic Fundamentalist nuclear power.

Such a power would raise the stakes on fighting terrorism enormously. For one thing, it would offer an impregnible haven, short of a nuclear war, for terrorists to grow and train in, just like Afghanistan used to be.

We may talk airily of starting a nuclear war, but only if we are foolish enough not to realize the consequences everywhere. Radioactive fallout knows no boundaries and, whoever we drop bombs on, millions of other people are downwind.

We are also no more prepared to manage the economic consequences of a nuclear war here than the physical consequences there.

The Chechen's want the right to form an Islamic state, right out of the Taliban. The same arguement was used by the Confederacy, to continue the practice of slavery. But at least there were Confederates with honor. The Chechen rebellion deserves to be stomped into a small stain on the history pages.
They wanted to send a message to Russia. Message received. Now, if Putin has any balls whatsoever, they will receive the reply they deserve.

Does anyone besides me think that Bush's 11 point "bounce" in the polls has as much to do with Russian hostages as it does with the convention?

Four years ago, candidates wanted the "soccer mom" vote. This year, I've heard it called the "security mom" vote. I think it's a real thing. In fact, were I a DU wacko, I'd question the timing of this hostage situation. It sure makes the RNC emphasis on terrorism look reasonable, instead of over-the-top.

The visceral response we are all having in reaction to this depraved barbarism is something no talk about the economy or gay marriage is going to override. We want safet, and if we can't have that, we want revenge.

Does anyone besides me think that Bush's 11 point "bounce" in the polls has as much to do with Russian hostages as it does with the convention?

Dani,
That is a good point. While I was temporarily giddy about those 11 points, I didn't trust them. That bounce happened before Bush speech. Now that you mention it, I wonder if the hostage situation didn't have something to do with it.

Interesting...

Joseph is not some lefty fucktard. He is making some very valid points and I would appreciate it if people would be respectful during this discussion rather than sounding like some looney Freepers.

Sure we can turn the ME into a glass parking lot but that isn't going to help us in the long run. The way to win this war is the way we are doing it. Changing the hearts and minds of those that are oppressed by spreading democracy and creating conditions for freedom. And killing only those bent on killing us as surgically as possible.

Joseph

I was trying to answer your question "what has been done" by the people in charge of our country right now. Your question offered implicit criticism of the measures or lack of them currently in place. There is surely a lot left to be done. I would love to have a discussion with a foreign service member who is knowledgeable about Middle-eastern and Central-Asian policy as it exists today and what they see down the road.

And I certainly agree with the Queen. You are asking about things that concern us all. The difference though between you and me is I see the glass half full...you see it half empty, don't you think? (Excuse the cliche)

Yeah and I agree with the Queen. Left-wing asshat fucktard reveals more about the commenter than it does Joseph. Not necessary to be so hateful when we are trying to discuss serious concerns and a grave tragedy with the death of Russion children at the hands of madmen.

By the way, the Chechnyan rebels/terrorists are not popularly supported by the people they claim to fight for. They are fighting for Shari'ia and nothing more. They will rule, if they succeed, as the Taliban. Are you listening,Explitive? Read something besides the peoples/workers so-called political commentary.

I think the facts are quite obvious now.

1) Joseph is going to bitch and whine and cry about "no results" until he sees action that aligns with his amoral Utopian standards. When they kill all the Jews and Christians, wipe out the conservative right (translation: anyone who wants to even hint at having morals), give all the money from "the rich" to his sorry ass so he can buy any whore he wants, force everyone in the country to accept Islam as the national religion, get rid of all guns and kives (but not the ones the criminals have), open the southern border and provide transportaion and high class hotels to any Mexican criminal who asks to come across the border (with instant citizenship of course), and rid the nation of those nasty religiosly slanted brain-washing private and home schools.

2) Joseph needs to get his own blog. Or if he already has one, needs to post there.

3) Joseph needs to FOAD.

Well, I guess there just has to be a certain number of clowns here under The Big Tent.

One man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter.
Both sides kill children, Russians have been bombing and shelling Chechen cities for ten years .
Did the Rusians decide not to negotiate about the release of prisoners and instead go in guns blazing?
With so little information how can you decide what is right.
Maybe everybodies wrong.

The russians decided-- repeat-- decided not to go in with guns a-blazing. Then they were forced to do so because the terrorists inside the building started blowing the place up. At that point they were obligated to save whomever they could. So,maybe everybody isn't wrong, just some of the commenters. It pays to actually listen to the news reports.

I agree (I've already agreed), Joseph has arguable and valid points.

Joseph. I'm interested in their delivery capabilities. If we strike pre-emptively, we'll know they are substantive.

Dave, a good analysis on a great site is here:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iran-strikes.htm

It already did happen here although on a lesser scale at Columbine, but I doubt seriously that we would let it happen here in our country now. If the terrorists thought they stirred up a hornets' nest when they took down the twin towers, killing our school children the way the Chechens did - there would be such an overwhelming, swift, military carnage unleashed on the middle east the likes human civilization has never seen. The pentagon wouldn't be haggling over sending 150,000 or 200,000 troops, the recruiters would have to fight off citizens who would be willing to fight. We would send millions to end this battle against terror once and for all.

That's why the terrorist probably won't try such an attack on our soil - the counter-attack would be too devastating. Death would lose meaning we get through with them.

Tim,
I agree. You and I both have schoolage children as do millions of others in this country. The fear I felt as the events unfolded choked me. I worry about attacks on our soil but the idea that my son or your daughter could be a specific target fills me with blind rage and unbelievable fear.

That is the way of life when you are a parent I guess. I fear less for myself than I do for my child. My child's welfare and safety comes before my own.

Did you hear about the woman that was freed? She was allowed to take a child with her - she had two of them in that building a 2 yr old and a 6 year old - those bastards forced her to choose one. They told her that she could stay and die with them both or save one. I can't even begin to comprehend such inhumanity.

Tim

Thanks for a rousing description of the military reaction you foresee if hundreds of American children AND their parents (those adult dead in Russia probably ALSO leave surviving children as orphans or at the very least with no mothers)were barbarically killed by terrorists on our soil. I'm horrified at the prospect but also reassured that those who hate us fear us too much to so foolishly strike at us in such a fashion. I am praying that they DO fear us to that degree after the retaliation against the Taliban and al-Qaeda after 9/11.

We wouldn't send troops in such a case. It would be a statement of total disarmament for all countries involved in supporting terror at a state level. Disarm and surrender now.
We have the biggest "or else" this world has ever seen, and after invading and overthrowing two regimes for supporting terror, I don't think they'd doubt the next step would involve a twenty-minute attack.