"American Planes Hit North Vietnam After Second Attack on Our Destroyers; Move Taken to Halt New Aggression", announced a Washington Post headline on Aug. 5, 1964.

This was quickly followed by much flag waving, calls to bomb them back to the stone age, and an open checkbook for President Johnson which led us down that slippery slope called Vietnam.

Now we have the World Trade Center. Followed by much flag waving, calls to bomb them back to the stone age, and a fat checkbook for Shrub.

This Is War

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.

Time to use the nuclear option

At a bare minimum, tactical nuclear capabilites should be used against the bin Laden camps in the desert of Afghanistan. To do less would be rightly seen by the poisoned minds that orchestrated these attacks as cowardice on the part of the United States and the current administration.

Congress OKs Use of Force

Congress voted overwhelmingly Friday to grant President Bush authority "to use all necessary and appropriate force" against those behind Tuesday's devastating terrorist attacks, part of a burst of activity as the nation's capital focused on mobilization as well as mourning.

I see the same arrogance coupled with an almost complete lack of understanding of what this will mean. How many people even know where Afghanistan is? Given Shrub's not so keen reputation for International affairs, I'm sure someone had to point it out to him. And he probably doesn't remember that these little brown men kicked the Russian's collective ass.

Do any of these people who want to bomb them back into the stone age have any understanding of what that means?

An Afghan-American speaks
You can't bomb us back into the Stone Age. We're already there. But you can start a new world war, and that's exactly what Osama bin Laden wants.

But the Taliban and bin Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps." It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats' nest of international thugs holed up in their country.

Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan -- a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.
(...)

So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads out of the sand. What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that, folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.

And guess what: That's bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this

Retaliation is trickier than Afghan terrain

Invading or occupying the country would prove difficult - Afghanistan is a rugged land whose fighters have defeated the imperial ambitions of several invading armies, including the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Any large military operation against Afghanistan would require the help of neighboring Pakistan, whose military intelligence service helped to create and train the Taliban. This critical connection is one reason why US diplomats have been working overtime, huddling with Pakistani officials yesterday and the day before to gain firm commitments of support.

Maybe all this call to war is because we haven't had a real war since Vietnam. Our illegal invasion of Panama hardly counts. The Gulf War, as presented in the media, was a video game but those that were there might say something different. But, in the end, the Gulf War was a turkey shoot. Bombing Yugoslavia wasn't a real war either.

Anyone who wants to bomb them back to the stone age should first go to the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington D.C. and read all 58,226 names aloud.

The next time the number will be much larger and we will have less to show for it.