"I agree. That?s why you may as well plan on annihilating the terrorists there."

It would be so nice if the terrorists would just co-operate - gather themselves into one spot and hold up signs saying "I am a terrorist - shoot me!" But somehow, I don't think it's gonna happen. Which is why I find your notion of annihilating them all so charmingly naive. <img src="/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

You're assuming that the number of terrorists is finite and non-regenerating.

"He DID have WMD (unless the UN was lying as well.)"

Interesting, then, how they all seem to have vanished into thin air.

"While that might have been the immediate reason for war, the primary reason was to remove an enemy of the United States from power."

That wasn't the reason Bush gave to the American people.

"As some would say: ?Mission accomplished.? "

As some others would say: "Oops. This puddle was a whole lot deeper than it looked when we stepped into it."

"As far as the prison thing goes, I find it odd that you feel sorrier for the abusers than the prisoners they abused. In my opinion, the abusers and the prisoners were all equally scum. "

I find it odd that most of these "scum" had no criminal records or history of violence, and yet by some amazing cosmic coincidence they all ended up in the same unit.

For a more plausible explanation of what happened - and why I believe those "scum" were victims of their own leaders - check out these web sites on the Stanford Prison Experiment:

"The Stanford Prison Experiment was a landmark psychological study of the human response to captivity, in particular, to the real world circumstances of prison life. It was conducted in 1971 by a team of researchers led by Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University. Volunteers played the roles of guard and prisoner, and lived in a mock prison. However, the experiment quickly got out of hand, and was ended early."

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Stanford%20Prison%20Experiment

http://www.prisonexp.org/links.htm

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/05/08/MNGN76IG761.DTL

For one critical of the comparison (which I personally didn't find all that convincing), see:

http://slate.msn.com/id/2100419/
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"The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled."
-Plutarch