Gee, nothing could have gone wrong with *that* idea.

If we had nuked Tora-Bora I think evrey ally who was with us in Afghanistan would leave. There would be absolutely no international support for a move on Iraq. The US might face economic sanctions and isolation that would make our lives much worse.

I do not fully subscribe to the idea of a "nuclear taboo", but the taboo serves us well if we pretend it is well-founded. There are no weapons of mass destruction, there are only policies of mass destruction. More harm has been done to Iraq by the combination of the sanctions regieme and the present war than would have been done by dropping a couple of 300kT bombs. And nuclear level harm has been done to Zimbwabe using only small arms and the control of food supplies.

. . . a preemptive attack on Tora Bora back then, using conventional high explosive weapons (yeah, a two-pound hammer instead of a six-pound one), had it taken out important individuals, would have made a difference. A small one.

We would still be engaged in a struggle with fanatics who want to blow us up. The difference would be which explosions happened and which didn't. In any event most would have.

Don't forget, this WOGT did not start on a sunny day in September, 2001. Please recall that about two hundred years ago an enemy succeeded in setting disastrous fires in Washington, DC. A terrorist act, perhaps?

And what about the endlessly repeated threats made against America for at least the last forty years? And that most of these threats come from devotees of Allah?

To confound and disable the enemy from a distance is better than hosting him in battle. If death is to be dealt out, let it be in the land that keeps him.

New reader here, just found this site today while doing a search for something else totally unrelated, but I did poke my head in here long enough to read some articles here.

I agree with yorickoid on this one, in that I would certainly disagree if there was a reason to, but really, there's no way to use nukes right. Even if these nukes somehow magically didn't cause collateral damage when dropped, got every single member of every terrorist organization present in the world at some weird cave viewing convention or whatever you want to fill in for a reason, and managed to leave behind unrealistically low amounts of radioactive fallout; with all of that there is still no globally acceptable reason to use nukes.

Dropping nukes probably would've not only destroyed any global good will we had from anywhere else in the world, it would've likely also led to most places at least thinking our leader is a nut incapable of properly leading anyone. Best case scenario if nukes had been dropped, the rest of America wakes up, impeaches Bush and Co. for dropping the nukes and we hold a new election that provides a competent leader. Worst case? The rest of the world tries to take Bush and Co. out when it becomes clear the American people aren't going to do anything about it and eventually WW3 breaks out with nukes falling everywhere. Without vault-tec vaults humanity and basically all life beyond simple insects and groups of plants and animals far enough away from any ground zero die off, with a nuclear winter finishing off basically everything else.

But, but, but ... if we'd done that, how could we enjoy the soon-coming Survivor: Tora Bora?

Delurking to say, I certainly will disagree, when I think it appropriate.

But I think you've nailed it in this post.
Instead of losing the "high moral ground", as the USA has (unfortunately) done, it would have put you right at the bottom, morally, and incurred the enmity of the whole world.

... but the stakes are pretty damn high. Would have been better to surround the area with massive numbers of troops and close in. Send in robots playing old Disco hits.

No, wait... that really would have nuked our moral high ground.