Is it maybe time to listen to the terrorists desires?

[Zagadka]

@Bosda Di'Chi of Tricor

Who is or is not to blame for the problems of the Middle East is irrelavant.

If we, as a nation, give a private individual or private organization the status & dignity of a nation, & negotiate with them as equals, we open the door to a diaster.

Every two-bit freak who can tie two sticks of dynamite together will believe that he can make demands on the US Government & get them. Demands to change laws, to alter policy, to re-write the Constitution—anything and everything!

And there will be so many attacks our socirty really will be torn apart.

No.

Osama gets nothing. But a bullet.

@SteveG1

There is only one way to deal with terrorists and mass murderers. That way is to hunt them down and kill them. You have to be relentless and ruthless, showing them the same mercy they show to their victims (none).
Listening to them and giving in only would encourage more of the same, just like when terrorists were hijacking planes to Cuba and other places.
You don’t reason with maniacs. Chamberlain tried appeasement (peace in our time) 50 years ago and it still doesn’t work.
Cut them off, isolate them, starve them out and then kill them.

Thank the good gods that you two don’t write policy, domestic or international.

When punishing a criminal, one must take great care to assure that one does not become a criminal. In the eyes of a lot of people, the attitude and actions mentioned above would virtually guarantee widespread resentment and unrest, and that is something that doesn’t go away - it festers, and it grows over time. You think things are bad now, you wait for 30 years from now when the kids growing up with America attacking their countries are adults. What kind of views do you think they will hold? Will the terrorists of today me martyrs of tomorrow?

On the other hand, do you really think that the vast majority of people living in the Middle East and Central Asia really give a flying f* what is happening in Anytown, USA? Do you think they want to sprread Islam to our children? Hell no, they want to get a pay raise at work and hope their kids are healthy and well educated.

The way to fight terrorism is by cutting the support for the terrorists off. It is by not letting them rile you up and get you to attack people, creating resentment. It is to be as rfiendly as possible with the people the terrorists supposedly represent. We should be in Iran and Pakistan and Afghanistan and Iraq and Saudi Arabia kissing asses and polishing shoes. We need to get those people - not the terrorists, the civilians - to like us. We want them to get good medical care and education and join the modern world, not cower in fear of being attacked by the West.

You have it completely backwards, and you are the prime threat to the future of civilization. Osama doesn’t hold a candle to what Bush has done to unbalance the world and create war.

Osama is basically a small time radical being made into a martyr and idol to millions of impressionable youths. It is their wrath your kids will face, and it is our war they will still be fighting.

[Master_Wang-Ka]

Near as I can tell, the GOP is doing its damndest to eradicate the middle class in America.

Why would they go so far as to foster it in other countries?

Easier simply to send the sons and daughters of our lower and middle classes to fight it out with the sons of their lower classes.

Seems like as far as the Saudis and the American power elite are concerned, that’s killin’ two birdies with one stone…

[SteveG1]

@Zagadka

Will the terrorists of today me martyrs of tomorrow?

The way to fight terrorism is by cutting the support for the terrorists off. It is by not letting them rile you up and get you to attack people, creating resentment. It is to be as rfiendly as possible with the people the terrorists supposedly represent. We should be in Iran and Pakistan and Afghanistan and Iraq and Saudi Arabia kissing asses and polishing shoes. We need to get those people - not the terrorists, the civilians - to like us. Osama is basically a small time radical being made into a martyr and idol to millions of impressionable youths. It is their wrath your kids will face, and it is our war they will still be fighting.

I was talking about targeting Osama and other terrorists, not all the other people who had nothing to do with anything. We seem to be attacking the wrong things and the wrong people. But I’m not for kissing anyone’s behind. Just leaving them alone should be enough. They’ll neer like us anyway, but at least by leaving them be, they won’t have a real reason to hate us. But I’m still all for the total destruction of Osama and his partners.

[Zagadka]

@SteveG1

I was talking about targeting Osama and other terrorists, not all the other people who had nothing to do with anything. We seem to be attacking the wrong things and the wrong people. But I’m not for kissing anyone’s behind. Just leaving them alone should be enough. They’ll neer like us anyway, but at least by leaving them be, they won’t have a real reason to hate us. But I’m still all for the total destruction of Osama and his partners.

We have a lot of goodwill we need to spread, so I’m afraid that a little asskissing is going to be necessary.

It isn’t a bad thing to be of service to someone else. Helping them fund their educational and medical and utilities would help our foreign affairs by leaps and bounds. Look what the Marshall Plan did for Germany, and similar stuff in Japan and South Korea. We can get these people to not only not hate us, but to love us.

The question is, are we willing to make that sacrifice (again).

I think of it this way: Osama is standing on a podium giving a speech and getting a crowd riled up. We come over and set up a pie stand offering free pie. Eventually, everyone comes over for some pie, and Osama goes home and blows up something, but otherwise is minimized.

You may replace “pie” with a middle eastern delicacy. I don’t know their dietary habits. :-p

[ZombiesAteMyBrain]

@Noone Special

Let the school bully have your lunch money once and… he won’t bother you anymore! Right !? :rolleyes:

But who is the real ‘school bully’? One could make an argument that the ‘school bully’ here is the USA.

[SteveG1]

They can make a heavenly meal out of some lamb and a few veggies. Makes me drool just thinking about that

[msmith537]

@Zagadka

That’s right. That’s why when I walk down the street, I punch everyone I see looking at me in the face. It lets them know not to f* with me, or I’ll punch them in the face.

That’s great. :rolleyes: If someone was going around looking for people to punch in the face, it’s a good bet they would go after the people they thought couldn’t or wouldn’t fight back.

@Zagadka

Whose oil is it? As I understand, the bin Ladens own a lot of that oil.

So? They have also made a lot of money. Do you think the Arabs just want to sit on a big reserve of oil that no one buys? Please explain your logic to me.

@Zagadka

Semi-true. We were importing their oil. Now we’ve destroyed their oil industry and are having them import oil in order to pay for rebuilding the industry we destroyed.

How did we “destroy their oil industry”? And you are talking about Iraq. Osamas beef is with Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Middle East. Their oil production facilities are just fine.

Sounds like an episode of MAS*H

@Zagadka

That is true, they have been taking away their own freedoms for a long time. Then there was that time when we helped them try to stop people from taking away their freedoms, then we started taking away their freedoms and they got a little peeved.

Please explain to me how.

@Zagadka

And the freedom we want is for them to choose between McDonalds and Burger King

Do you honestly believe that anyone cares about what they eat for lunch?

@Zagadka

I thought this wasn’t about taking their oil?

Oops?

Sure…whatever. :rolleyes:

We need to buy oil from the Middle East. Oil is owned by the ruling class in most of these countries. The rest of the country lives in poverty while the shieks drive around in Mercedes Benzes. That breeds resentment. Radicals like Osama feed into that resentment by telling people the West is to blame. Now I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t advocate us going in there by force and disposing of the shieks and turning the oil fields over to the people and we don’t want a civil war which could destroy oil production, so what;s your recomendation?

@Zagadka

Nope. It is an issue of decades of terrible foreign policy decision making and diplomatic failures leading to a revolution. Only it isn’t an internal revolution like we’re all used to, it is an international revolution, and we have no clue how to fight that - and we are failing badly in our attempts to do so.

So what foreign policies would you have implemented instead?

[Merkwurdigliebe]

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.