Do you think the history of terrorism started on 9/11?
We tried that approach for decades. And literally thousands of Americans died as a result.
Does terrorism "work?"
Sure it does. Gavrilo Princip’s shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand to establish a free country of Yugoslavia, and just four years and a mere 38 million casualties later, Yugoslavia was created. :rolleyes:
Most of the time it’s really just about hate though. The man who killed 50 people wasn’t oppressed, he didn’t like to see guys kissing. THe next one will be angry at women wearing bikinis. Another will be upset about pigs as pets.
Terrrorist may not be moral, but they may be wholly rational.
No. It’s thought a failure by those who make that assumption. But it’s not a particularly rational assumption to make.
Terrorism is a particular tactic, or set of tactics. Asking whether terrorism works is a bit like asking whether any other military tactic works. The answer is not a simple binary. In some circumstances or environments, this tactic will have a better chance of working, in different circumstances or environments, that tactic. Frequently, a tactic will have a limited chance of working, but still a better chance than any of the other tactics that are practical.
Terrorism is a tactic deployed in circumstances where there is a massive disparity of military power. In a conventional battle in the field, Irish Republicans could never defeat the British Army, and ISIS or Al Qaeda could never defeat the US forces. Instead of inflicting a military defeat, terrorism seeks to undermine political support for your opponent’s strategy. This won’t always work, of course, but it can work. A hundred and fifty years of conventional armed rebelliion and/or constitutional political action failed to establish an independent Irish state, but the guerilla tactics of the IRA succeeded. It wasn’t the 32-county independent republic that they wanted, of course, so if you want you can say that terrorism “failed”. On the other hand, the outcome was an independent Irish state which would not otherwise have existed, so if you want you can say that terrorism “worked”. Similarly terrorism “worked” in Northern Ireland to bring about radical political change that would not otherwise have occurred.
(You can take a similar approach to any military tactics. Did conventional war against Nazi Germany “work”? Well, yes; it destroyed the Nazi state pretty comprehensively. But, no, it failed to prevent the substantial carrying-through of the Holocaust, which would be the kind of reason why we might want the Nazi state destroyed.)
Well, the immediate object of terrorism is to create terror. In that respect, terrorism routinely succeeds. But usually the terrorists hope to create terror to achieve some further end - to weaken the resolve of the British people to support the occupation of Ireland, for example, or to escalate a conflict so that more people will be radicalised and/or forced to take sides, or to expose the inherent contradictions of capitalism and so hasten the dawn of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Sometimes it advances progress towards those further ends; sometimes not. It partly depends on how realistic or attainable those ends are.
I said at the very beginning of my post: “I’ll focus on the AQ/Isis brand of terrorism here since that’s the kind on most people’s minds” which implies I do not think the history of terrorism started on 9/11. That was the reason why I included that sentence.
With that said, I think we can both agree there seem to be no easy solutions to terrorism.
Your numbers don’t appear to make sense to me. I know about Oklahoma city, Beyrouth and the USS cole but those only tally a little over 400. Not thousands. Can you please provide a numbers of how many americans actually died in those decades, and at whose hands so I understand what you mean better?
I’d also like to know what your recommended approach to terrorism is, if it’s not to treat terrorist groups like a particularly nasty form of organized crime. Maybe you misunderstood me and thought I was advocating only Cops/FBI should be involved and not the military/CIA/NSA/etc. I meant no such thing.
Obama’s pretty much following my approach. The only difference might be what my tolerance to collateral damage is versus his and I have the comfort of knowing my conscience is clean. I don’t have to decide how many children are ok to die in drone strikes. I am not responsible for the lives our our soldiers. I don’t have to answer to their parents, siblings or spouses if I order a raid instead of an airstrike. That is some gruesome math that I’m glad not to be part of…
Terrorism is a hybrid of a law enforcement/war problem. If the terrorist organization is sheltered or financially backed by a state, that’s a military problem. If the terrorist organization runs a state, that’s a mliitary problem. If a terrorist organization controls territory, that too is a military problem. Warrants are not being attached to the bombs we are dropping, obviously.
Yes. He wasn’t even really religious so I agree with everything you said completely.
On a slightly unrelated note, even if people aren’t oppressed (and are solely driven by hate and megalomania) they can still delude themselves into believing they are, based on where they get their news and whatnot.
For example, there are significant numbers of evangelist christians who feel like they’re being oppressed and persecuted in the U.S, allegedly the most lutheran-friendly developed country on earth.
Totally agree once again.
The US invasion of Iraq was terrorism, right?
I think it probably felt like it was.
Not in the sense I think we are talking about. Terrorism is a certain set of strategies. It is not synonymous with “violence”.
The US didn’t need to employ terrorism - we had the military power to impose our will on Iraq (and Afghanistan). Terrorism is what groups do when they don’t have that kind of power, and try to terrorize the other side instead of conquering them.
An organization that can bring off a sustained series of attacks such as you describe has to be large enough, and well-organized enough, to present a target for counter-attack. bin Laden had been given refuge in Afghanistan, and set up training camps there. After 9/11, good-bye Taliban.
And I don’t think there are enough domestic terrorists to bring off a lot of large-scale attacks. Most of the terrorism in the US has been lone nutcases shooting people or setting off bombs or whatever. And there has been a fair amount of kvetching about how the US is now a police state, because of the counter-measures put in place to try to deal with these fairly isolated cases.
Can you imagine what would happen if there really were tens or hundreds of thousands of Islamic terrorists in the US, and they started killing thousands every month? Lincoln suspended habeus corpus during the Civil War, and Roosevelt put the nisei into internment camps during WWII. It would be much the same. Lots of innocent people would be arrested, and no doubt after it was all over we would apologize and pay reparations. But we would also engage in a organized, large-scale effort to find the terrorists and neutralize them. And we would catch some of them after some semi-failed terrorist attack, where they weren’t able to commit suicide (and some of them would chicken out and not suicide), and they would be subject to “enhanced interrogation” until we found out the organizers, and we would investigate the hell out of it until we discovered where the leaders were, and in what country.
Mao-Tse Tung said that the revolutionary must swim thru the populace like a fish swims thru the sea. Islamic terrorists can’t do that in the US, because mainstream America has no brief for terrorism of any stripe. Every man’s hand would be against them (as well as against anyone with an Arabic sounding name). They can’t blend in like they can in the Palestinian territory.
If we over-reacted to 9/11, I see no reason to disbelieve we would react even more strongly to repeated 9/11s. We would not be frightened into submission - we would be enraged into killing. And we are real good at that.
I have heard theories that the goal of 9/11 was to enhance bin Laden’s status as a major “leader”, in the sense of “see how I can get people to kill themselves and other Americans” and then sort of bask in the sunshine of feeling important, because large numbers of SEALs chase you until they kill you. But of the goals he mentioned in his letter to the US, exactly zero of them have been achieved.
Regards,
Shodan
Well you pulled out part of the argument, here’s some more of it: