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Oh dear, we're getting into a discussion about Islam and the United States. haku - your argument seems to be that everything in the world is the fault of the United States and Israel. Your comparisons are grossly unfair. The US is far from perfect and I'm very critical of it, but this idea that the US is worse than Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein would be laughable if it weren't so sick.
Saddam Hussein murdered 300,000 Iraqi citizens (UN estimate); it is indeed possible that 5000 Iraqi civilians died in the US invasion of Iraq, which is less than the number of people that Saddam Hussein murdered every year during his rule. The ten Iraqis who have died under US interogation in the last year is less than the number of Iraqis who died under torture every week under Saddam. United States personnel have tortured suspected insurgents at Abu Ghraib. The Baath Party had regularly and officially committed far worse tortures on a far larger scale than anything the Americans have done to people who simply expressed a contrary opinion. In fact, all Arab states routinely torture political opponents. This does not excuse what was done, but it's important to keep it in perspective.
The fact that the US has executed several hundred convicted murderers over the last 30 years is neither equivalent nor comparable to stoning women to death for adultery in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan or Afghanistan under the Taliban; nor is it equivalent or comparable to the mass murder of members of the "wrong" ethnic group, as happened in Saddam's Iraq, Taliban Afghanistan or is happening now in Sudan. The human rights abuses committed in these Muslim countries are far worse and on a much larger scale than anything the US has done in recent years.
I do not support Guantanamo Bay, but keeping supected terrorists under detention is not worse than keeping peaceful political opponents in prison and torturing them, which happens in every Arab country.
Israel's driving Palestinians from their homes in 1948 and its occupation since 1967 of the West bank and the Gaza Strip are wrong, but they did not cause or justify the dictatorships in Arab countries. What Saddam did to the Iraqi people is far worse than anything Israel has done to the Palestinians. The way the Saudi regime treats women is also worse than the way Israel treats the Palestinians. The Sudanese government has massacred tens of thousands of its non-Arab citizens in the last few months. What has been the reaction of the Arab states? They helped elect Sudan to sit on the UN Commission for Human Rights. The only country that protested against this travesty was - the US.
I remember the millions of people who marched against the overthrow of Saddam. I don't remember them protesting when Saddam was massacring his own people. I don't see them protesting about what is going on in the Sudan. Indeed, haku claims that the root cause of the problems of the Middle East is US support for Israel. I'm not clear why that makes it necessary for Sudan to massacre its black citizens.
Make no mistake, I despise George Bush. But there is a dangerous tendency among people around the world who dislike the US to romanticise anyone who is in conflict with 'The Great Satan' and pretend to themselves that the failure of the US to live up to the principles enshrined in its Constitution makes it as bad as or worse than Al Qaeda (which proclaimed after the Madrid bombings "you love life and we love death"), Saddam Hussein (who consciously modelled himself on Joseph Stalin) or the Sudanese regime (which has ideas about Arab racial purity that seem to owe a lot to the Nazis).
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