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>Actually you bring up something that bugs me sometimes. There seems to be an assumption that liberals are pacifists and only conservatives can be "tough on terror." I disagree with that and consider it mainly a Republican political tactic to paint things that way. No one can say the current administration is not conservative, yet after 6.5 years of chasing Osama bin Laden he is still walking the earth and releasing taunting videos. We need to fight back against Al Qaeda. The disagreement is over tactics, namely Iraq. As someone once said, invading Iraq in response to 9/11 was about like it would have been to invade Spain in response to Pearl Harbor.

Now we're talking.

The one thing that provoked this whole branch of the thread is that you just kept on with "we should send our boys to clean out the remainders of al-Qaeda in Pakistan", without bothering (and I've asked for clarification several times) to mention any consent, agreement or invitation by the friendly government of Pakistan. As if they didn't exist or matter at all, as if their borders required less respect than a speed limit sign.

Without respecting your friends, how do you intend to have any? The relationship with Pakistan is tenuous at best already, and the regime or whatever they have is having tough time staying in power while being friendly with the US. And nobody can guarantee that, if tables are turned there, the next government would honor the special relationship with the US. And if this government is caught in anything dishonorable and humiliating while dealing with the US, how many days does it have left? So if Musharaf is seen as letting the US just a tad too deep in, or giving up too much of sovereignty in aiding the war on (or even against!) terror, how popular does that make him?

And without any mention of any of this, you just want to blindly send the guys in and be done with it. That's neither liberal nor conservative, that's just blind and careless. Which has, historically, been a trademark of the current regime in DC. In that (dis)respect, they have behaved like a herd of elephants in Pottery Market. The "winning the hearts and minds" was just an empty soundbite, stolen from some previous wars - they never gave a damn.

OTOH, I really think you should watch for the kinds of precedents you set, because the whole Anglo-American culture is based on common law, with no axiomatic set of laws, but tradition and precedents. You guys believe in precedents, that's your culture. And if you set a precedent, like you did with Noriega - boy, you arrested a president of a foreign country... now your president is game, too. He finds a legal weasel who'll blur the game and legalize torture and outsourcing thereof. Guess who's the next customer in that system? Any country where CIA or Blackwater of any other paramilitary unit/company operates can claim they are terrorists, not covered by Geneva, and eligible for rendition outsourced to a country of their choice. And how is Guantanamo better than Vietcong's pits? Because it's positioned into another legal hole? Perfect - now any country can keep your guys imprisoned in any legal hole as well, say in a prison on a territory under dispute, on any sort of no-man's-land... whatever their legal eagles come up with.

Which is why I mentioned the "careful what you wish for".