Okay, i will get straight to the point.
- is there any chance this could start a world war (WW3)
- is there a chance the people responsible have access to large enough weapons to wipe out the world.
- what is George W. gonna do about it?
Hopefully a war. A war large enough to get our point across but hopefully NOT WWIII. The only way to stop these people is to show them that terrorism will NOT be tolerated. I think war is our only chance at preventing this and similar tragedies from happening again.
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Hard to say, but it seems like they would have used them already if they had nukes (“nukes”, im assuming, are what you are refering to?
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- what is George W. gonna do about it? **
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“Hunt them down and make them pay” (paraphrased)
This seems more like an IMHO than GQ topic, but…
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Doubtful (I hope).
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Hmmm, could be.
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Dunno. Been back and forth over this with some friends. I don’t envy him right now.
My emphasis.
You got a cite on that? Do you think that terrorists assume that their acts will be tolerated? That is frankly ridiculous IMHO. They know damn well that if they are caught they will cause purest hell to rain upon them (if they live), and quite possibly their families, their organisation and their country due to their acts.
Lets face facts. We are talking about desperate and/or near crazed people. If I had to guess at their motivation I would suggest they are seeking real or imagined revenge, or martyrdom, or infamy, or major changes in the world order. And there is no better way to achieve the latter than by provoking the US to rash acts and war.
In short I don’t think that “showing the terrorists their acts won’t be tolerated” would be showing them anything they don’t well know already, and that advocating war is quite likely advocating precisely what whoever is behind these acts wants.
My emphasis.
You got a cite on that? Do you think that terrorists assume that their acts will be tolerated? That is frankly ridiculous IMHO. They know damn well that if they are caught they will cause purest hell to rain upon them (if they live), and quite possibly their families, their organisation and their country due to their acts.
Lets face facts. We are talking about desperate and/or near crazed people. If I had to guess at their motivation I would suggest they are seeking real or imagined revenge, or martyrdom, or infamy, or major changes in the world order. And there is no better way to achieve the latter than by provoking the US to rash acts and war.
In short I don’t think that “showing the terrorists their acts won’t be tolerated” would be showing them anything they don’t well know already, and that advocating war is quite likely advocating precisely what whoever is behind these acts wants.
Wake up. These people DON’T CARE. They are crazed religious zealots that think they are doing god’s work. Check this out:
The only way to stop these people is to bomb them. Bomb the countries that harbor them. Bomb their houses, bomb their buildings, their hideouts, their bases, everything. These people will not respond to anything else. Hell, they won’t even respond to death (but that of course won’t matter if they’re dead.) It’s a very sad fact but these people simply don’t care. They aren’t like us. They would be happy to die in a war on American because they think it’s a free ticket into heaven. Like I said, I regret any loss of human life but what else are we going to do? Are we going to put them in jail so that their allies take hostages and commit more and more terrorist attacks in hope that we will free them? Are we going to execute just the ring leader so someone else can take his place? Seriously, if you have an answer to all of this that doesn’t have the word “bomb” in it I would really like to hear it.
Look it’s been a long day, I may be missing something here. Didn’t my post say precisely that these people were crazed and desperate? Now you are telling me they are crazy as if that were not my point exactly.
Didn’t your first post say that “The only way to stop these people is to show them that terrorism will NOT be tolerated” which does rather seem to imply that if you merely show them that, they will stop? Wasn’t my point precisely that merely showing them a lack of tolerance to their terrorism would not do so?
And your solution seems to be to advocate bombing everyone with a view to simply killing everyone and everything with a terrorist intent. Instead of challenging me to come up with a solution that does not involve bombing, you might care to elaborate on how your solution involving bombing will work. Start with these thoughts. Indiscriminate bombing campaigns are notoriously ineffective at killing individuals. Saddam is still alive. Hitler killed himself. Milosovic lived out the war. After the dust cleared following your carpet bombing of one third of the world’s surface (or whatever it is you intend) the terrorists would just creep out of their bunkers and give you the bird.
And another thing, the survivors (and unless you are seriously advocating genocide, there will be plenty) will hate the US with a fanatical passion. Every negative comment ever made by Hussein, Gaddafi, Bin Laden etc about the insensitivity of the US will have been “proven correct”. The number of fanatics you would “create” who would be willing to kill themselves in an effort to attack the US in revenge for example for what might be “collateral damage” to you, but would be the unjust killing of their mother, daughter, whatever to them, will multiply a thousandfold.
The mass bombing campaign in North Vietnam (which unleashed more explosive than the whole of WWII on that tiny country) did not win you that war, and very likely did nothing but strengthen the resolve of the North Vietnamese to fight (and win against) the aggressor.
The whole of the civilised world has had a bad day today. My commiserations to the US for this awful incident. But rash super-violent “solutions” will not help.
If they did, why would they bother to hijack airliners to use as bombs?
What Princhester said.
You would be happy to start WW3 for 10-50 000 dead Americans? Eye for an eye and so on. Look how well that kind of thinking is working for the Israeli or people living in the Northern Ireland.
Osama Bin Laden has already denied his involment. This may or may not be true, but consider the possibility that the terrorist group was of American origin. Do you still agree that those people should be bombed? I’m not saying that the guilty should go unpunished but an act of iniquity cannot justify another.
[peering through the dust and rubble of multiple bombings]
Now, don’t y’all jump on me, but–what about economic sanctions?
[whoa, whoa, I said don’t jump all over me…]
Okay, so what if at some point down the road, the Feds succeed in getting hard evidence that it was indeed Bin Laden & Co., and demand that the Taliban (or the Pakistanis or the Saudis or whoever) hand him over, and they refuse–
So I see serious economic sanctions ahead, rather than bombs. And I don’t mean your garden-variety half-hearted Iraqi-style “We aren’t going to do any business with you EVER AGAIN Saddam Hussein you evil person and we really mean it this time, oh, and about those oil prices…” economic sanctions, I mean a real old-fashioned economic lockdown and blockade. Nothing goes in, nothing comes out.
How long before the government in question caved, and suddenly discovered Bin Laden hiding under a desk in his mother’s backyard?
And yes, I do see Dubya & Co. sticking to their guns (so to speak) and patrolling the lockdown borders. This isn’t Iraq, far away and alien–this was “Our Big Buildings” that the Bad Guys knocked down. No way would “The Great American People” be prepared to wink at “sort of” sanctions in this matter.
And, er, Cisco? Isn’t your “bomb them all back into the Stone Age” approach kind of, well, unfair? Bomb who back into the Stone Age? Who exactly do you mean when you characterize “these people” as people being unworthy of living, of people who really ought to have their lives, and their civilization, totally destroyed by American carpet bombing? The Taliban? They’re just a committee. The people of Afghanistan? Why is it their fault? The government of Pakistan? Who? Exactly which group of people are you suggesting that we point the U.S. Armed Forces at and say, “Sic 'em!”
How about we go up to Pendleton, New York, and bomb them back into the Stone Age, as their punishment for having unleashed Timothy McVeigh upon an unsuspecting world?
And–also in the interests of fairness, I will point out that we don’t know that it was Bin Laden & Co. It could have been anybody.
Am I the only one who remembers the first few days after the Okalahoma City bombing, when the entire press corps was pushing the “It was Palestinian terrorists!” button as hard as they could. The Feds were rousting people with Mideast passports right and left.
And am I the only one who remembers the general sense of surprise when it turned out to be “one of our own”?
I wouldn’t, but it has been pointed out that the death toll in this terrorist attack is certain to exceed that of the Pearl Harbor attack.
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*Originally posted by Cisco *
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IANA Muslim, but doesn’t a fatwa have to be issued by a Muslim cleric of some rank or another? bin Laden is not a member of the clergy that I am aware of…
-Rav
General Questions is for questions that have factual answers, not questions that call for speculations as these questions do.
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DrMatrix — General Questions Moderator