>>So, bridgman, who are you rooting for in the Iraq conflict? The guys who are just "defending their country from an occupying force" or the guys who are attempting to help the Iraqi people establish a representative gov't in Iraq?

I'm rooting for the US/Britons (and the handful of Canadians ) all the way. I was just trying to make it clear that there are at least two different kinds of "resistance" at play in Iraq, and that nobody should even be TRYING to hang a "freedom fighter" placard on the groups who are kidnapping and killing aid workers. They are animals, not "guys defending their country from an occupying force", and deserve to be hunted down and eradicated. They will NOT get better when the conflict ends, they will still be bullies and murderers.

There ARE a lot of pissed off Iraqis right now who fervently believe things were better for them before the war -- typically the middle classes who would be buying Axioms right now if the power wasn't off again and their place of work wasn't a smoking hole in the ground. These are the guys who will go back to work and become solid citizens once things settle down.

I just don't like seeing the likes of the group which bombed and shot a school full of children being treated with the same moral ambiguity as a group of pissed off Iraqis who felt they were better off before the war and are protesting & throwing stones at the US troops.

The first group needs to be hunted down and wiped out without mercy. The second group should be given a bit of consideration.

We're all reading too much into this thread. I shouldn't have piped in on politics when I was dog-tired. I was just replying to someone's comment that maybe we shouldn't be so hard on the REAL terrorists because they might have had a legitimate grip -- trying to say that "if you have a legitimate gripe and you're taking potshots at the troops I can sympathize although we're probably going to have to return fire and kill you -- but once you start killing innocents there is no return and no mercy, you get hunted down and wiped out".

Anyways, I'm even more tired tonight. Don't think this is helping.

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