Uh, we're talking about the Middle East here, not the Middle Kingdom. Wait! I think I hear Gandolf calling out your name! Run! Run back to the Middle Kingdom, Odin of Azgard!

Here's one for you. Let's take that oil for food program and extend it to the entire middle east. I don't know if any of those countries can feed themselves. I know Egypt imports half its food-stuff. If we aligned ourselves with the oil-poor nations of the world that happen to produce an abundance of food, we could start an FPEC (Food Producing Economic Community) and jack the price of food up every time oil passes $50 a barrel. Every new birth in the moslem world would bring us closer to world domination. Not only would we get cheap oil, it couldn't help but calm the entire region down when they realize we're the ones that keep their stomachs from growling at night.

10-4, alopekos.

Okay, technically a relationship did exist between Omar and the Mujahideen in that he fought with them prior to the establishment of the Taliban, but the direct point of what we are talking about is whether the US is somehow complicit in the establishment of the Taliban by having supported the Mujahideen. A clearly ridiculous claim. And yes, some of the Mujahideen were radicalized by the war but not for some backward logic that it was because we supported them against the Soviets.

Hmm. I still don't understand how you are drawing a connection between the Taliban and the Mujahideen. (BTW, the nut job didn't even try that--although his connection was even more remote than that.) True, some would-be Taliban and would-be al Qaida fought for them, but that in no way makes the Mujahideen complicit or connected with anything that these individuals did in the future. If the DC sniper was once in the US Army, does that make the US Army in alliance with him? I just don't get what you're saying.

Actually, we may have both made a couple errors. The nutcase did not mention the Taliban, I brought them in carelessly. And OBL did fight in Afghanistan as part of the Mujahideen. But that was before he started his terrorist career and to draw a link between our current enemies and the Mujahideen who fought the Soviets, is absolutely erroneous. Per Wikipedia draws the timeline as follows. The Soviets withdrew in 1992, the Taliban then were not fighters but merely a small politico-religeous organization that had just started in 1991. It was only in 1994 that Mullah Omar first mobilized his followers into a military force. By then, we were long gone.

No viable data? Saddam Hussein & co.: dead. Top level Af-Pak Al Qaida: Osama bin Laden: dead. Kalyid Sheik Mohamed: captured Atiyah Abdul Rahman: dead Abu Faraj Al Libi: captured Abu Zubaydah: captured Matiur Reman: captured Midhat Mursi Al Sayyid Umar: dead Mustafa Abu Al Yazid: dead Abu Jihad al Masri: dead Midhat Mursi Al Sayyid Umar: dead Ilyas Kashmiri: dead Fazul Abdullah Mohammad: dead Abu Laith Al Libi: dead Mohammad Atef: dead Ahmed Farook: dead Etc. While it is impossible to conjure a world where we did nothing after 9/11 and so have no way of providing evidence, the justification for Iraq will be judged by future historians by what is about to happen in Iran. BTW: How's that going for you guys?

First questions I ask myself: Why do I want to respond to a nut? Its like deciding to take on a raving lunatic on the street. There's no percentage. What is amazing is an obviously deluded person disrupting our conversation. He has nothing relevant to say. Ignore him and he might go away. While I fully invite people with opposing views to engage in this platform, that doesn't mean we have to accept the mentally ill.

Your inability to distinguish between the Mujahideen and the Taliban reveals more about your anti-American psychosis than it does any kind of accurate reading of history. FYI: Whatever the Iraqi Sunni Arab insurgents decided to call themselves, they most certainly were not a part of the Afghan war nor would any historian associate the two groups. And, in fact, I could not think of a better term than "freedom fighter" to describe those who kept the Soviets from continuing to advance their empire through overt militarism. The Left's ignorance knows no bounds.

And as for supplying Saddam with the raw materials to make the bomb, here we have another less than half-truth. Just what part of the materials did we supply him with? Was it the Mr Coffee that the scientists used in the break room? If you are not a liberal but instead consider yourself a "libertarian," I have lost what the meaning of the word is. I've always considered myself a libertarian, but I've never considered myself a propaganda spouting opportunist willing to sell my fellow citizens and army down the river for the convenience of promoting a political position. You make me sick.