OBL wanted to draw the US into a war. He thought that the other primarily Muslim nations in the region would then join his side in a great holy war against the Western World. My evidence for this? An intercepted radio message from OBL to his troops near the end of the battle of Tora Bora, where he said “Our prayers were not answered. Times are dire and bad. We did not get support from the apostate nations who call themselves our Muslim brothers. Things might have been different.”
The San Bernardino terrorist was born in Chicago, graduated from Cal State, and had a cushy government job with the county. I don’t think there’s any feasible amount of additional “show them the good life” that can be done. Some people just need to be killed.
That may work on the weak willed, but not the true believers. They think the world is a sinful, decadent place. Their true reward is in the afterlife.
Ending imperial ambitions, better propaganda, promotion of secularism and atheism. Long term, probably economic and cultural integration.
So, which religion do serial killers practice? Religion might be stopping some people predisposed to killing from killing.
Well, obviously I can’t argue with the thoughtful and insightful point-by-point rebuttal you have made to my post.
I’m sure that’s true. And then reasonable people should be able to look at the facts and decide how much their beliefs were in accord with reality. We do not have to accept that all beliefs are equally valid.
Belief is not the exactly the same as point of view.
You may believe the US to be benevolent but those on the receiving end of all the bombing and meddling have a different point of view. Reasonable people would
conclude that the US is a highly agressive nation, that interferes in affairs all around the globe, mostly under hypocritical pretenses and outright lies.
It is a nation that can not be trusted in the least.
Funny then that many countries DO trust the US…‘in the least’. You can look at nations that aren’t ‘trusted in the least’ and sort of see the difference. North Korea, for instance, or Russia or China by the majority of other nations. Iran. There are plenty of examples of how countries are treated by the majority of the world community when there is a lack of trust or outright no trust at all…and, generally, the US doesn’t fall into this category, though, obviously this is a continuum not a perfect trust verse no trust at all. The US falls somewhere on that continuum…and it’s not at the bottom of the scale, at least not for the majority of nations. Wonder why your assertion doesn’t match up perfectly with reality in this regard? Or were you just being hyperbolic there? 
I do agree with you that perceptions shift depending on who you are talking too and what events have shaped their perceptions. Ask the average citizen in the ME if the US is trustworthy and you will get a different answer than if you ask the average person in Japan or Canada…and even in those specific places, opinions are going to vary.
How many nations have you asked exactly?
Or are you just asserting stuff.
Well, it’s pretty intuitively obvious that if the statement that the US was actually ‘a nation that can not be trusted in the least’, instead of simply your opinion, that the US wouldn’t be in the various trade or military alliances they are in. Countries who can’t be trusted in the least, after all, wouldn’t be, you know, trusted in the least with anything, including vital trade or military alliances…and there are a lot of nations that have such treaties and alliances with the US.
However, since you asked me for a cite so nicely :p, this is one I’ve used before. Favorability doesn’t necessarily translate into trustworthiness, of course, but then your hyperbolic statement was simply your opinion, in the end, so I don’t think I really need to go any further in demonstrating that. Really, you should have just acknowledged that it was YOU who were ‘just asserting stuff’ and left it at that.
To de-radicalize, you need to know who they are in advance. The PLO underwent a program after Black September where they were encouraged to get married and have kids and that appeared to have an impact.
I don’t know how to have the same approach to prevent a 9/11 style attack however. We were already ignoring the FBI report from Phoenix, and the terrorists were hanging out in strip clubs and bars. The San Bernardino attacker was married with a kid - it appears that it was his wife that radicalized him.
How do you feel the United States compares to other countries? Is the United States more trustworthy than most, less trustworthy than most, or around average? Same questions about aggression, hypocrisy, and benevolence.
Personally, I don’t feel the United States is the shining city on the hill. We’re far from perfect. But I also don’t feel we’re the worst country in the world either. Overall, I feel we’ve behaved better than most countries have.
Being only nominally versed in the literature on radicalization, I can simply say that the most good can be done with prevention, specifically preventing the major factors the correlate to radicalization such as extreme poverty, a feeling of helplessness/purposelessness, and social/cultural isolation. In this respect, radicalization is just an acute sub-type of gang initiation.
“Deradicalization” will likely just be a short-term solution and a crapshoot at that. I would tend to agree with you that the “true terrorists,” whom I would define as those who are fully committed to radicalized ideals, likely will be too far gone. Another issue, like gang initiation, is that the short term solution of imprisonment can actually increase radicalization via prison recruiting and further resentment. Thus why prevention would be the most powerful force in decreasing radicalization.
I don’t know the profile of Atta, but a different approach would likely need to be tried if he could be deradicalized at all.
A couple of points to consider:
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A lot of people are trying to apply the rules of logic that SANE people follow, to people who are NOT SANE. The term “radicalized” has been spun up in the common speech, but is still more akin to casting a magic spell, than it is to anything else, when it comes to describing why and how someone once APPEARED to be nice and harmless, and then lashed out.
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Terrorist organizations are NOT made up of one single kind and character of people, any more than any political party, or social group is. They have intellectuals, propagandists, support personnel, AND they have actual terrorist “soldiers.” Often, the people chosen to make suicidal attacks, are NOT the intellectuals or the propagandists, or the support personnel. They are chosen for that role, because they are “nuts” already, in the right way to allow themselves to be used as walking bombs, or whatever.
And the reasons why the terrorist leadership wants followers to die for the cause, are not always what they have the propagandists announce that they are.
My own assumptions about this:
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there’s no way to use LOGIC to dissuade the nut cases to behave well.
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SOME of the leadership, depending on what they think they can accomplish through terrorism, cans be persuaded to use a different approach. That’s how the IRA was reduced, years ago. But since the leadership of such groups usually have complex reasons for choosing their course of action, no single act or offer is going to persuade ALL of them to change.
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yes, the history of British and then American “imperialism” often is an element at the root of this stuff. But deep historical concerns cannot be erased in a single generation, and often not in many generations. So “playing nice” wont impress 99% of the people who already hate your guts on sight.
Bottom line, YES, people who are headed towards doing something destructive and crazy CAN be deflected and even occasionally “saved.” However, there is no way to formulate a general plan, approach, or big picture strategy, to defeat terrorism. Instead, each element in the terrorist edifice has to be addressed individually. And since addressing some elements involves bribes, some involve education, some involve rational persuasion, and some involve arranging for their violent death, it’s very hard to address ONE subgroup of the organization, without the “solution” for THAT part of the group, causing ANOTHER section of it to “radicalize” even more, and go bat-crap on everyone.
Less trustworthy than most.
As stated, highly agressive. How many wars have you been in since say 1945?
The hypocrisy ties in with the two former. The US constantly spouts propaganda how bad/evil others are but always excuses its own behaviour even if it is exactly the same or worse.
The US is never at fault, when it is it redefines the terms or suddenly we just have to accept Realpolitik. Or it just makes up total lies.
I believe the people of the US are surely benevolent, they just have totally no idea that their government is not very democratic. They actually believe that their voting for a president, every 4 or 8 years, actually has an effect on (foreign) policies.
F.I. did you really think the Project for the New American Century was over?
Name any country that has interfered with as many foreign countries in the past 60 years.
US Has Killed More Than 20 Million People in 37 “Victim Nations” Since World War II:
And the people who fight back are the radicals.
Good grief. And you believe this mostly uncited ‘report’? Even when, given the few details available in it, they do such things as chalk up ever Afghani (as well as places like Angola, Chad, Chile, Cuba, etc )killed during the SOVIET occupation to the US’s ledger? Seriously man…you really need to let your ridiculous hatred of the US go, at least enough to look closely at the cites you give and think about them in some sort of rational way.
There are stats you can use to show the US has been less than friendly and has caused a lot of deaths. Certainly millions of them. But 20 million people in 37 countries, many of which the US never even had military operations in? If you use the ridiculous methodology this ‘report’ is using you could chalk up literally hundreds of millions of deaths to places like Russia or China…maybe in the high hundreds of millions. When you do stuff like this it’s hard to take you seriously…
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Name any country that has interfered with as many foreign countries in the past 60 years.
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You are shifting the goal posts from what Little Nemo said. Interfering with more countries does not equate to ‘behaved better than most countries have’. Personally, I disagree with Nemo on this…I think a better way to phrase this would be that the US has behaved better than the vast majority of superpowers (or even regional powers), both recently and historically. But many countries (most really) have so little power or are so disengaged that they ‘behave’ better than the US simply by default.
The USSR/Russia?
Excellent point.
A related consideration: the CONCEPT of “radicalization,” was invented in part, to provide a simplified explanation/answer to all the people asking how and why seemingly sane people, came to commit insane acts. By calling it “radicalization,” instead of “politically and logically persuaded,” the powers that be avoided any chance of sympathy of any kind, developing for the people being targeted.
It also served a more pitiful function: it supplied the professional News Media, with a snappy sounding catch-word label to simplify their reporting jobs.