>>After the towers fell the grown-ups did what had to be done. Ignoring all the hand-wringing, and what did >we do wrong, and why do they hate us and what will the French think and the dire warnings of quagmire, >they sent some truly extraordinary people who will only go into history books as nicknames to do >amazing things and 100 days later the Taliban was gone. ( the French, it turns out, were thinking about >the big payday in Baghdad. )
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>This is trully scarry statement!
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>Tomorow, after well done public campaign ('Wag the Dog') they could defeat let say Finland in 50 days ?
>'Nokia' is preparing mobile phones of mass-radioactive-contamination!
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>Trinidad & Tobago wld be even easier!
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>How about Switzerland ?
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>Is world really better & safer place just because Taliban / Saddam are gonne?

Yes. And it will be even safer when the Bekaa Valley and all of Lebanon are purged of Hezbollah and the Syrians and when the mullahs are ousted in Tehran and the kakistocracies running Syria, the Sudan and the Palestinian Authority are replaced by the many intelligent, decent, and rational people in these societies. ( okay, maybe those people are in shorter supply in Sudan )

You will remember that before we took out the Taliban consensus was that Afghanistan was a place that had swallowed up the British and the Russians and we would suffer 10,000 casualties. In fact, we used about 200 CIA officers, 300 Special Forces/Delta and Seals and $50 million or so in cash. Our casualty rate was lower than traffic deaths in New York in one day. I would be very surprised if you could find any international opinion in late September 2001 that thought taking out the Taliban would be akin to defeating Trinidad and Tobago.

It was a brilliant effort and defied conventional wisdom. Al Quaeda and the Taliban were under the impression that we would fire a couple of cruise missles and hold a press conference. They were thinking Bill Clinton. We know from captured diaries and intercepts that Somalia had convinced Bin Laden that the U.S. would cower in fear if we were attacked.

The problem with the blustering boasting so common in some cultures ( " the mother of all battles ", " we will wring England's neck like a chicken ", "we will drive the Jews into the sea" , "we will bury you") is that people start to confuse this pompous rhetoric with reality. Standing in the streets chanting "Death to America" may be very cathartic - but one should be very carefull about declaring blood feuds if one is not ready to accept the consequences.