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MSN Search Roundup
Thomas Hawk writes "Well after almost 24 hours of public release, The Seattle Post Intelligencer seems to have the best round up on the professional opinions on the new MSN search beta. Bottom line seems to be that nobody is going to be switching over to MSN Search from Google anytime soon. The story includes opinions by
Walter Mossberg,
John Battelle,
The Wall Street Journal and others.
"
My understanding of events that led to the war in Iraq is as follows:
Your sequence isn't too bad except for the implication that #5 wasn't justified, that #6 is a very questionable assumption, and that #7 is a liberal spin of reality.
I'd modify your sequence to end with:
4. Saddam very foolishly continues with his threats.
5. USA retaliates against Afghanistan after Afghanistan refuses to cooperate with demands related to shutting down terrorists camps and turning in Bin Laden. As far as I remember no government and very few citizens of the world thought this was inappropriate.
6. The government pushes hard to address the global terrorist threat based on the rather obvious premise that if terrorists are willing to kill themselves they are not going to be deterred by the U.S. retaliating against a country.
7. The U.S., having awoken on 9/11 to realize that even 19 unarmed passengers can attack the U.S., realizes that the ongoing threats of a country that at one time had WMDs, attacked three of its neighbors, and was still under suspicion of WMD should be taken more seriously. Ultimatums are made and ignored including by the U.N. The U.N. is unwilling to act but the U.S., recently stung by what we didn't even consider a threat, decides to take no chances and deal with the problem.
It seems you have the sequence basically correct but your ultimate conclusions are affected by your political ideology.
Okay. Agreed.
5. USA retaliates against Afghanistan after Afghanistan refuses to cooperate with demands related to shutting down terrorists camps and turning in Bin Laden. As far as I remember no government and very few citizens of the world thought this was inappropriate.
There were in fact millions of people protesting about it in the streets of Europe. In the case of my country, Norway, the government decided to suck up to USA instead of listening to the people, and sent a symbolic amount of troops to Afghanistan "assist" them (Norway has a tiny army). The thing that angered people was how USA decided to take matters into it's own hands and act outside of the UN. I can perfectly understand how many Americans believe it's their country's mission to save the world. I respect that opinion. I just don't share it.
7. The U.S., having awoken on 9/11 to realize that even 19 unarmed passengers can attack the U.S., realizes that the ongoing threats of a country that at one time had WMDs, attacked three of its neighbors, and was still under suspicion of WMD should be taken more seriously. Ultimatums are made and ignored including by the U.N. The U.N. is unwilling to act but the U.S., recently stung by what we didn't even consider a threat, decides to take no chances and deal with the problem.
To my knowledge, later investigations showed the claims of Saddam having WMDs never had any truth to them. I haven't really kept updated on the situation in Brittain, but the British government is/were basically being accused of lieing about that issue, to justify assisting USA with troops. I read that one or more rather high ranking people decided to leave their government positions because of the revelations. Even if the claims of manufactured intelligence turns/turned out to be untrue, it's still poor intelligence work.
I can't say I'm convinced. I'm not a person who decides to keep an opinion simply for the sake of keeping one. Anyone who can properly clarify exactly why it was nessecary to attack Iraq will have my humble respect.
I can, in some ways, understand why Afghanistan needed to be retaliated.