Originally posted by Nash
In light of your "harbouring terrorists" position, can you tell me why Iraq was invaded instead of Saudi Arabia, the nationality of the 9/11 terrorists? Iraq harbours more terrorists than the Saudis?
Or how about the phat checks Hussein wrote to the Palestinean suicide bombers. Why not attack the Palestinean suicide bombers themselves?
If you give me one of them "well we gotta start somewhere, look out world!" answers I'm gonna hurl.
Iraq refused to cooperate in the war on terror. The hijackers were Saudis, as is OBL. However, the Saudis are at least making some sort of effort to cooperate in the war on terror. How sincere and competent that effort is, is in fact subject of great question. OBL is a sworn enemy of the Saudi royal family. He's even an outcast to his own Saudi family.
While OBL is himself a disenchanted Saudi, and is in fact PNG in Saudi Arabia, and he recruits other disenchanted Saudis, he is supposedly still operating in AFGHANISTAN. Hardly a sound reason to invade Saudi Arabia.
If the hijackers were Muslims from Norway (just an example, not a knock on Norway) would it then be a valid option to invade Norway, even though the base of operations was not in Norway, but the perps were citizens of Norway? This is the rationale you provide to invade Saudi Arabia as opposed to Iraq, and it really doesn't hold up.
Considering that the U.S. is attempting to broker peace between the Israelis and the "Palestinians", we could hardly just drop into Israel and "Palestine" and go after "Palestinian" terrorists. That would be a little too obvious an example of taking one side or the other, leaving no grey area from which to negotiate. Besides, the Israelis are doing a pretty good job on the leaders of the terror groups that run the bombing operations. Witness their recent successful attacks on Hamas and Hezbollah leaders.