Negotiating with terrorists is a horrible idea, but just because they choose an awful way to adress valid complaints that doesn’t mean you can’t address the complaints.
Look, we should be out of the way in the Middle East. We shouldn’t be in Iraq or wherever, because it really isn’t our business. As far as I’m concerned we shouldn’t have gotten them pissed at us in the first place. What we have to do is kill the terrorists, or neutralize them, in a way that doesn’t promote the cause.
Firstly, their call to arms, us invading their soil and being in their affairs is a huge call to arms. Bush did Osama so many favors by invading Iraq. Afghanistan wasn’t such a good recruiting tool for OBL, but Iraq sure as hell is. Flypaper strategy and all, we can’t fight the terrorists over there either because we make them faster than we can kill them.
It takes a special kind of person to commit suicide for a cause. There aren’t so many of those, but I bet a lot of people here wouldn’t have problems resorting to bombs, guerilla warfare, if we were occupied by China, for instance. Its not that hard to see.
So what we have to do is give OBL less ammo to recruit while simultaneously killing them without killing innocents. The only way around this, I see is through complacent governments with capable law-enforcement agencies.
I see it as a really long-term situation. To get a capable law-enforcement agency in Pakistan, there would need to be people that are educated to believe that America isn’t “the great satan” That would require a lot of work on so many different levels.
But the simple facts are this…
We are considered “the great satan” by way too many people
Too many people make their livelyhood through preaching this…
We have to stop this somehow… War isn’t the way, because its not a problem of weapons and troop numbers, its a concept like freedom in America. Its so deeply ingrained in their society that facts don’t come into it much.
I was quite upset about knowing that OBL was alive. I was sure that he was dead in Tora Bora.
Killing terrorists is fine if that is what it takes, but the best way is to have the people of the world to deny terrorists. If you have people in Pakistan that approve of OBL, there is obviously no hope, because they think that we get what we deserve and that we are doign something so evil that it makes sense.
So fighting terrorists only solves the immediate security problems, and not very well, I might add. The multitude of offensive measures available to terrorists and the pitiful defenses that we have are no match. They can win almost any game. How hard would it be to have them go to schools with AK47s and simply mow down as many kids as possible? Not that hard, honestly.
We should appease the terrorists, but we should kill them too. If they say, get out of our Holy Land, we should do it, but then we should kill them anyway. We should kill them because we hate terrorists, not because of some defensive reason. So we take out all of our troops in the Middle East, and we make peace in Israel. Wouldn’t that be enough to stop 90 percent of the terrorists from forming? What would their recruiting call be? Hey, lets go bomb America, because… Their movies show women with equal status in society!
Sure, there will always be people that are against us, we just have to be liked to the point where nobody is willing to commit suicide to kill us.
And we also can’t show weakness either…
But fighting terrorists with bombs is the stupidest thing ever known. How has that worked for Israel? What really gets me is that this strategy seems to still hold water with some people when we have an example of this approach that clearly doesn’t work.
I wouldn’t be so scared about terrorists, actually. Things are looking up in Israel. Sharon has taken a major change in policy regarding settlements. I don’t really know why, but he seems to be taking a more concilatory stance now.
If Israel and Palestine are at peace, then there will be one less reason for terrorists to form. That will be good.
When I think about it, maybe bush wanted to invade Iraq because he believed that we would end up looking better in the Arab world? It could have been one reason for him. But it seems to me that he feel for the same trick as I did when I tried to start a business. I ignored all of the signs that it was already being done or that it wouldn’t work, and I had to find out the hard way. Things like that happen when you ignore reality.