The terrorists have no home base we can conquer to defeat them. So that makes it a little tough to “defeat terrorism”.
But they do seem to have a fanatical devotion to a militant literalist Islam and love the city of Mecca. So could we put out the word that if a city is blown up in the US or another large scale attack takes place, we’ll turn Mecca into a parking lot and they’ll never see it again?
Would that work or would it just inflame everyone even more?
Dunno, do you think the Jews would be a little irked if you nuked Jeruselum?
If you want a way to unite a few hundred million people against us overnight, nuking Mecca would probably be the most effective. Not only would it instantly polarize Muslims worldwide, it would completely alienate us from any - and I mean ANY - potential ally. Even El Salvador would draw a line, I think. Europe wouldn’t piss on us if we were on fire.
Even invading Mecca with conventional forces would have a profound effect.
It would enflame all arabs, remove any hope of co-existance and turn every able bodied muslim into a volunteer martyr. For an example, we nuked Hiroshima, not Toyko. Doolittles raiders were told to stay away from the Imperial Palace.
Let me put it this way:
I thank og that you aren’t sitting at the button.
Your plan is equivalent to telling the IRA that you will nuke the Vatican if there ever would be another terrorist attack conducted by them.
Not only would the execution of your plan drive uncountable moderate Muslims towards extremism and terrorism, it could also mean World War III. If e.g. North Korea sees that the US nukes whatever they like whenever they like they will likely just launch their nukes because they feel cornered. And that my friend, I definitely do not want to experience.
In short, possibility of WW III and a couple of millions of (understandably) extremely pissed muslims. Plus I would suppose that you would be even lonelier on the world stage than before.
The Pacific Ocean–is it a big desert, or is it sort of dampish?
We’d have a billion+ people who would every one of them be our sworn, implacable enemies; and just about all of the other 5 billion or so people on this planet would have zero sympathy for us.
This is just utterly wrong on multiple levels. In no particular order:
[ul]
[li]We aren’t at war with “Islam” and we don’t want to be at war with “Islam”. The President has said so repeatedly. Getting into a Holy War with a major world religion is both tactically unsound and incompatible with out own values and system of government.[/li][li]Escalating to nuclear weapons would be a huge step. Only if we were attacked with nuclear weapons ourselves would this be seen as justifiable by the rest of the world.[/li][li]Reprisal killings of innocent people who are not responsible for terrorism is barbaric. Mecca is a city, you know, and people live there. Little old ladies and little kids and so on.[/li]Mecca is the holiest site in Islam, but it’s not like the Kaaba is the mystical source of power which holds the Dark Side together. If Mecca were destroyed, Islam would still exist (and in a permanent stated of pissed-offed-ness for at least centuries to come, probably millennia). It’s not like destroying Mecca would destroy Islam; it certainly wouldn’t destroy al-Qaeda–al-Qaeda would become vastly more powerful from this. Therefore a threat to destroy Mecca in retaliation to terrorist attacks wouldn’t be credible–it’s not like we’d be threatening to destroy their religion, only threatening to commit a barbaric act of massacre and a desecration of their holy place. It’s not like they’ll think destroying Mecca would somehow “kill Allah” or blot out the Qur’an.[/ul]
…and we have a runner-up! In second place, just behind ‘nuking New York and electing Augusto Pinochet POTUS’, The second worst possible solution to a given problem, IS… nuking Mecca!
OK, I’m sorry. That was mean. But, seriously, really bad idea. Imagine how you’d feel if you were a law-abiding citizen, and someone even threatened to nuke the centre of your religion killing 1000s of innocent people because of some nutjob terrorists. Or imagine if you slightly sympathised with the terrorists’ point of view, but felt the nuclear country couldn’t be as bad as they say.
There could be room for variation on the theme. Say, promise to remove foreign influence from country X provided no terrorist attacks occur in time-period Y. But the Irish can tell you how difficult that can be to pull off.
The OP appears to be proceeding from the assumption that the twisted interpretation of Islam that certain terrorists use to justify their acts is the mainstream interpretation, or that the behavior of these terrorists somehow represents majority Islamic opinion. Both of these notin are false, near as I can tell.
I seriously doubt one is going to get many favorable responses to the notion that several hundred thousand innocent people should be threatened with roasting by nuclear fire for the potential actions of at most a few thousand widely scattered crackpots.
Recall that Harry Truman deliberately chose sites for the atomic bomb drops that were NOT religious centers. To bomb or occupy Mecca would be as big a mistake as one could possibly make- the US would permanently and justifiably never occupy the moral high ground again.
Sure, it’ll work. That is, it’ll work if your goal is to make the US into pariahs and insure that every Muslim in the world will hate our guts and probably BECOME terrorists.
Heck, let’s nuke Mecca and Jerusalem! Just to show we’re being evenhanded!
Well it might work (OP here). It’d be difficult to pull off.
Note I didn’t say we would nuke Mecca now or ever. We’d just put it in their minds that we might if they were so unkind as to nuke Chicago or blow up the Lincoln tunnels, etc.
It would jar them psychologically. No matter what they do to us, we’d still have enough firepower in place to nuke something they hold dear. It’s kind of a psychological weakness - the idea of losing Mecca is unthinkable so they do anything to avoid it.
When they attacked us before, their basic idea is “hey what will they do? Bomb some rocks in Afghanistan? Who cares?”. (There is a story out that Bin Laden dismissed any military reaction of the US - he wasn’t worried about it).
They didn’t nuke Tokyo because of the Imperial Palace, they wanted cities that hadn’t been bombed all to hell like Tokyo had been. So they could pattern the damage from the bombs.
Are you kidding? These people think they are writing history (and they are). If we EVER nuked Mecca, even in response to a larger scale, WMD attack on America, they would relish the moment. Sure, they would lament and feel sad for the loss, but in their view, they could rebuild Mecca in a thousand times the glory, but it would unite the Muslim people (and a lot of the rest of the world) against the West (with starring quarterback, Uncle Sam). They would have open recruitment, legitimacy, and carte blanche to do whatever they pleased, possibly with the support of, say, Pakistan, which has nukes and is largely Muslim.
You still think it is a good idea?
Forget antagonizing Muslims. The mere threat of nuking one of the most important sites in human history would inflame the entire – freaking – world.
I cannot think of one religous leader of any mainstream denomination that would think for one second that the threatened destruction of the home of a major world religion through an act that, especially if threatened carried out during the Hajj would be compared to genocide, is in any way a moral action.
I wonder if the OP thinks if kidnapping the Pope and threatening his execution would make Catholics change their mind on, say, the issue of abortion. You can’t threaten people into giving up strongly held views.
Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. These people are psycho and suicidal. You think we can scare them into thinking once, let alone twice, about attacking us? I doubt it. It would make them that much angier at us, and infuriate a lot of other people. When you escalate war in this manner you’re just asking for trouble.
I think you’re way off base here. They did lose something when Afghanistan was attacked. A number of important figures were caught and they lost a safe haven. Threatening Mecca wouldn’t have helped either.
And he was wrong about that, wasn’t he?
Nukes would be bad. But consider just hauling away the sacred black Ka’ba and storing it in a secure location. For every act of terrorism, make a TV broadcast and show the world that you’re chipping away another piece of it as retaliation. That should send the message: Stop blowing up people or the holy stone is history.
Not to flame the OP or anything, but by the name of Primus, what kind of reasoning does it take to believe this would be a good idea?
Apart from all the other things that are wrong with this - say USA made that threat. Say I’m a fanatical Christian or Jewish or atheist or whatever terrorist (they exist, you know), and that for some reason I really hate muslims. You don’t think I’d be a teeny bit tempted to blow up an American city and leave a “Love, Osama” postcard on the site?
Some people are having a real hard time wrapping your head around the whole “NOT pissing off every single Muslim on the planet” concept.
Please tell me you didn’t take that seriously, just because I forgot a smiley :rolleyes: