OK. I’m not drawing any particular line in the sand. I’m not choosing any sides. I’m not even specifying the conflict. You get to specify who “we” and “they” are, if it is important to your stand or argument.
The situation is that there are people committed to destroying us or our way of life. Negotiations and reasoning have failed. Killing us individually or en mass by whatever means they can is only the worst of the weapons at their disposal.
The question is, how far should we go to defend ourselves?
I value my side enough that I want it to survive as completely as possible, so my answer is that we should do anything and everything possible, up to and including extermination of the offending group. (I would hope that extermination would not be necessary, that after a certain point the enemy would see that the path they have taken is destroying them rather than us.)
There are other legitimate points of view, at least for individuals. To paraphrase Gandhi (at least in the movie), he is not willing to kill for his cause, but he is willing to die for it. However, I do not see that as a valid option when facing a committed and violent enemy.
Life in prison rather than death penalty? Certainly possible, at least if they can be identified, rounded up and sent to the same area. If they can’t be identified, that makes it a lot tougher.
Shock & fear would break an opposing force long before extermination would happen.
Disrupt a group’s leadership, & the group loses drive, misplaces objectives, loses cohesion, & sees its organization break down to the point that it no longer constitues a group.
If that happens, then extermination wouldn’t be necessary…but then at that point we no longer have people so committed to destroying us. Until/unless they reorganize and try it all over again.
You realize that some of those same principles are being used by the people you are targetting, right? They aren’t particularly concerned with who they kill either. It’s not quite the same, as they don’t have the capacity to exterminate.
I also don’t accept your premise, that the only possible defense is extermination. The current tactics, while they will take time, seem to be making headway.
Trust me, I’m all for using force to defend ourselves, but the idea of extermination of innocents (and that’s exactly what you’d be doing) isn’t an acceptable solution to me, even if it would work, which I doubt it would. All you’d be doing is creating more people who hate.
Telemark, it is easy to assume I ('m trying not to) refer to the current world situation with the US, Iraq, Bin Laden, etc., but for purposes of this question I am not. In other words, the enemy may indeed have the capacity to exterminate us, it just may take a some time.
And exterminating them is not the only possibility, it is simply the final one, if all other options have failed.
Good God, who exactly are we taling about here? The entire rest of the World? That’s the impression I sometimes get from this kind of paranoid extremism. What “negotiations and reasoning” have taken place and with whom? Yes, in the Islamic world, there is a hard core who will always hate the U.S. and al-Qeda represents the hard core of the hard core, and yes, there’s no reasoning with these folks. But I don’t believe that the majority of Muslims are so evil as to want to “destroy our way of life” and it would take more than the evil intentions of a small group to do so.
For example, I’ve heard Palestinians ask, “Why won’t the US come and save us?” This suggests that they haven’t completely lost faith in America yet, but they’re moving in that direction.
And in Iran, the majority of people want greater freedom and better relations with the US; it’s just the mullahs curently in power who are maintaining the hard line.
There is still hope. The US should:
hunt down and destroy the terrorists and those who harbor them.
Use tactful (as opposed to Falwellesque) diplocamy and dialogue to encourage Islamic societies to liberalize.
Improve its behavior on the world stage by becoming a “team player” and supporting international organizations.
sqweels, don’t panic. The situation is totally under your control. If you want it to be the US against the rest of the world, that is your choice–not mine.
Thanks for specifying a situation and including some specific steps you would want taken.
Returning for a minute to SFSG’s original hypothetical:
If there were a group that wanted us dead, and our only means of ensuring our survival as a people was to completely exterminate them, then yes, I think that would be justifiable. Any organism’s primary function is survival; I don’t think ours should be any different.
However, I certainly don’t think that extermination should by the first option (and I don’t think the OP was suggesting it should be), and I don’t really feel it should be an explicit goal. We kill the ones that are most likely to get us. If more of them become a threat and our safety is in jeopardy, and we need to kill them too, we do so. And so on. If we happen to run out of aggressors, well then, there’s your extermination, but it was never a stated goal.