Is it Time for Bush to Apologize for America's Arming of the Taliban and KLA?

``All officials, including the ministry of vice and virtue, have been given the go-ahead to destroy the statues,'' the Taliban's Information Minister Qadratullah Jamal said Thursday. ``The destruction work will be done by any means available to them.'' ``All the statues all over the country will be destroyed,'' he said. The statues mentioned in the article are statues of Buddha. One of them is 175 feet tall and one is 120 feet tall and they date back to the 3rd and 5th century AD. UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura said of the planned destruction, ``In Afghanistan, they are destroying statues that the entire world considers to be masterpieces,'' UNESCO Director-General Koichiro Matsuura said. ``This iconoclastic determination shocks me.'' Considering what we have seen in Kosovo from the Kosovo Liberation Army fundamentalist Muslims, who also were armed and supported by the United States, the European Union, NATO and the United Nations along this line, why would Matsuura be shocked when the Taliban follows the KLA's lead? The Western press has largely ignored the desecration and destruction of Serbian Christian Churches in Kosovo by the KLA. So, the front page reports in the Washington Post and New York Times of the Taliban's desecration and destruction of Buddhist religious statues is a most welcome surprise. The KLA and the Taliban have a lot in common. Both are armed fundamentalist Muslim fanatics determined to destroy the people and the symbols of other religions and both were initially armed and trained by the United States. Both groups were called "freedom fighters" by the West and the weapons they are using to kill, main religious people and destroy religious artifacts are mostly those they have gotten from the United States.. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to give aid to the Communist government, the United States provided Stinger missiles to the "freedom fighters" and taught them how to shoot down Soviet aircraft. By 1999 left over Stinger missiles were being deployed to hijack an Indian Airbus as the Taliban demanded release of some of its terrorists. The Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, dismissed the West's concerns by saying: "We do not understand why everybody is so worried. All we are breaking are stones."A mullah is honored in the Muslim faith as one who is learned in the shari'a, the sacred law of Muslims. At least the Muslims in Afghanistan are being honest about what they are doing by openly admitting why they are killing, maiming and destroying all that stands in their way of a purely Muslim state. In Kosovo over 100 Christian churches and monasteries, some dating back to the 13th and 14th century, have been destroyed by the KLA terrorists US helped arm. However, in both situations, the Western media has shown literally no concern for the suffering of the people involved, much less the threat to religious treasures. In Afghanistan, a once stable nation of 15 million people has been literally destroyed with little mention in the West that six million of its population were driven out as refugees<…>.