My, what a discussion! One observation here: You are either willing to see yourself in another human being...or you are not. If you are not, then you can easily justify killing him, torturing him, executing him, and making war upon him.

Osama probably thinks Bush is "a piece of crap" too, while seeing himself as a noble freedom fighter and a dedicated servant of God. That's typical human tunnel vision, the failure to see oneself in the other human being, and it leads to all sorts of tragedy and disaster.

Spot - Going to war against Hitler and Hirohito in 1939-45 was absolutely inevitable. It was a quite different situation in a number of respects from what faces us now. When a large, well-armed major power launches its armies and air forces across borders and sends navies to attack other navies, war is inevitable. What we are dealing with now is a far more diffuse and indefinite situation than that, with far murkier objectives. It is an attack on outward symptoms that is going forward, rather than an attempt to heal the basic illness...kind of like the "War on Drugs", a flawed and misleading campaign if ever there was one, doomed to failure from the start, because it was an attack on symptoms, not on original causes.

- LH