Ah yes, now I remember

...why I continue to hate Henry Kissinger with every fiber of my being:

“Why did you support the Iraq war?” Gerson asked him [Kissinger.]

“Because Afghanistan wasn’t enough,” Kissinger answered. In the conflict with radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate us. “And we need to humiliate them.”

So of course, Kissinger - his aim as accurate as it was during Cambodia - advocated a war to humiliate the Muslim world by attacking the most secular state in the region.

Monstrous incompetents, all of them.

In the next life, someone will have to explain to me why, say, showering the people of Afghanistan will $300 billion in aid and reconstruction would not have been sufficiently humiliating for the crazed lunatics of Al Qaeda. (No, Olaf, I'm not saying we respond to 9/11with only humanitarian aid. Sit down.) Responding to attacks and acts of violence with generosity - turning the other cheek, to quote some guy - has a long history in western thought. Certainly, rebuilding Afghanistan properly would have a) delegitimized the charge that the west, and the US particularly, hates Muslims, and b) would have been a better use of the Iraq monies anyway.

Hmm.... $300 billion over Afghanistan's 31 million comes to... just under $10,000 a piece for every man, woman, and child in Afghanistan. Over the last five years, that would amount to $2,000 per person per year, or increasing Afghanistan's per capita GDP by two and a half times.

Actually, I suspect avoiding the Iraq war and rebuilding Afghanistan competently would have been humiliating for the crazed lunatics under bin Laden. The Taliban would have no way of saying - like they do today - that things were better during their tenure in Kabul.

This scenario would not, however, have been sufficiently humiliating to Muslims for the crazed lunatics in the Bush Administration.