Terrorism: What is your plan?

Great Debates
1

There have been a lot of threads critical of the Bush Administration’s actions to thwart terrorism, but precious few alternatives have been offered.

That’s what this thread is for. Those of you who are opposed to what the Bush administration is doing, time to put up. Let’s hear your ideas. What would YOU do to combat terrorism? What is your plan to ensure the safety of Americans?

One guideline I’d like us to adhere to in this thread: Let’s leave the Bush bashing out. There are plenty of other threads for that, and if we allow it this will just devolve into another anti-Bush pile on party.

So let’s keep it positive. Let’s hear your best ideas for ridding the world of the threat of terrorism, and especially mass terrorism potentially involving weapons of mass destruction.

You’ve been elected president. This is your anti-terrorism press conference. What’s the plan?

2

Well, I don’t have to have a solution to terrorism to think that war with Iraq isn’t one.

I think the money spent on the war could be better used to recruit secular Arabs to infiltrate terrorist organizations; generally beef up intelligence assets; hire diplomats to work hard at getting other countries to interrupt terrorist financing and stuff along those lines.

Of course it’s hard to rally the public to get the political support needed for Congress to appropriate money for such behind-the-scenes activity. It’s much easier to blow the bugles and sound the charge, at least at the beginning. It’s only the cold, gray dawn of the morning after that is troublesome.

3

I should add to the second paragraph that the President gets the big bucks and the prestige presumably because he or she has the acument to get Congressional support for effective although unglamorous action.

4

Interesting question. I would disagree though with your contention that

The problem here is, as I see, that there are certain people who see any alternative that doesn’t involve shooting someone as completely invalid.

The War on Terrorism is an illogical proposition. It is unwinnable on the terms that George Bush has chosen to fight it on. Terror cannot be “fought” by attempting to kill those currently seeking to carry it out, this has been proved over and over again. There will, I believe always be terrorists as long as there is grievance in the world, and that is why I reject the very basis of the War on Terror - it only increases grievance, so it can only fail ultimately.

We cannot fight terrorism. We can prepare ourselves and take steps to prevent specific episodes. If we truly believe that a democratic, free society is superior to others (putting a bit of clear water between myself and GWB here I think) we can stand by these ideals and trust that they will stand us in good stead, rather than compromising our societies and giving succor to those who would like to destroy them. And then we can start to make the compromises that are necesary to reduce the inequalities and grievances that allow terrorist ideologies to florish.

Do you think this would get me elected…oh well…plan B, bomb somewhere.

5

Stage Zero: The INS is still complete and utter hell. As is Airport security. Implement professionalism standards. Get someone good from Rudy Giuliani’s programs that rebuilt the NYC police and other departments. There’s some really good stuff there.

Stage One: Get Rudy. Send him on a roaming journey of our civil bureaucratic infrastructure. Get Al Gore, do the same. Get some good engineers, some ex-Seals, maybe some SeaBees, send them on a tour of the civil infrastructure. Find ways to eliminate danger zones, to reduce failure loops, and so forth. This will have the side effect of also making the nation safer as a whole. For example, this would have dealt with the Power Grid blackout last week.

Stage Two: Reiterate the public stance that any foreign country supplying terrorists that assault the United States will be destroyed. And rebuilt. Point out gently that we’re a bit stretched right now… so we might have to use the less accurate guns in the future.

Stage Three: Deal with Saudi Arabia. Most of the recent terrorist issues have basically been a civil war brought planetwide. This can not be appreciated at all. Open friendlier relations with Syria and Iran. Continue being friends with Jordan. Egypt and SA are going to be bad holes for a while. Don’t let them bullshit us. I’m not talking invade or anything, but something appropriate has to be done… I just don’t know the precise sequence.

Stage Four: Continue to insist on getting China and Japan and SK involved in any discussions with NK. Kim won’t survive forever.

Stage Five: Never give up on Israel. Talk with Jordan about maybe having Israel buy some of their land… try to figure out a solution to the “Either Israel or Palestine has a sea port” issue. May need to dig a canal or harbor.

Stage Six: There is NO Stage Six

Stage Seven: Continue to isolate France and Belgium. But stay friends with Germany and Italy. Try to help Spain out.

Stage Eight: Stay active in Africa. Try to help people out in a respectful and responsible manner… or in twenty years, we have jihad from over there and a charnelhouse. Be the Good Uncle… and it’ll pay off in time.

There you go. One plan, mostly stuff that can’t be said in press conference, though stages Zero and One can be. Going to need regional advisors, going to need to treat even the people we want to screw over with respect. And I know much of it can be shattered horribly, but that’s my rule of thumb of what to do when president.

6

The problem is that – assuming we’re ruling out time travel as an option – the situation Bush has already placed us in is a difficult one to combat terrorism with. It’s hard to build an international effort against terrorism when the United States now has a $1-billion-a-week sinkhole in Iraq, 150,000+ solders that aren’t available for fighting terrorism, and a pissed-off international community that’s not so willing to help us out any more.

Asking “Tell us your plan to combat terrorism, but don’t bash Bush in the process” is like saying “Tell us your plan to save the sick patient, but please don’t talk about the exposure to radioactive materials he got last month which is complicating the problem.”

7

1 - Good police work. Simple follow through would have prevented 9/11, you know.
2 - Stay out of conflicts that aren’t ours, like Iraq/Kuwait the first time around. We can be supportive of UN actions to correct such injustices, but we don’t need to stick our necks out. All of what we are going through now started with us intervening in that conflict, a conflict in which we had no business intervening.
3 - Get a coherent plan together to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan, execute it quickly and competently, and then get out.

Number 2 is the most important piece for the long term. An ounce of prevention and all that.
Number 3 because we’re in the swamp up to our necks now, and the only way out is to drain it.

8

I’m sorry, but the OP topic is in my opinion a very one sided and thus very bad one, since it goes out from the unexisting situation that “the US only” is and ever has been target of terrorism.

May I remind you that the world has known terrorism and had to deal with it since decades even before the majorityu of the US became aware that they didn’t live on some sort of an Island In The Sun where the rest of the globe didn’t count or wasn’t even known.

And in comparison with other regions in the world the USA is still a very safe place on this globe.
This despite all the rethoric of your current government in their attempts to make the citizens of the USA feel that unsafe and threatened, that the majority even blindly supported and still supports the invasion of and occupation of a sovereign nation.
And even firmly believes that this whole “war on terrorism” is a very good thing and has as only goal “deal with this threat to the US security”.

Well, it is not a good thing at all and it doesn’t deal with any threat of terrorism at all, since it creates every day more feeding grounds for new recruitments.

And who do you think has the most problems with that and has to face the most direct threats coming from that?

Do you think that a flood can be fought with a bucket where on top of it someone time and time again shoots wholes in?

Well, I can tell you that this is done since decades outside the USA, because the USA doesn’t leave us much more then a bucket due to its short sighted greed-inspired and Israel protective foreign policy since decades. And the USA doesn’t stop with shooting wholes in the bucket because of its extreme lack of honesty and its extreme patronizing arrogance.

And now, with this criminal invasion of Iraq under pretexts from which everyone with a brain knew that they were extremely twisted, exaggerated upto even false, ignoring international law and setting a most dangerous precedent: I can inform you that we don’t even have any buckets left to try to stop the flood.

May I use this cyberspace to thank your government very much for this from the bottom of my heart.

Salaam. A

9

Sam, there are so many hot spots in the world which have terrorism problems - just so many - and often they don’t involved Westerner’s or the USA in particular. Two in particular which leap to mind are the “Shining Light” assholes in Peru, and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

But the paradox we see nowadays is this - rightly or wrongly there’s a perception worldwide that the USA wasn’t “really” interested in solving terrorism whilstsoever US citizens weren’t involved. It’s a bit of two edged sword is that one… namely… the more media coverage that US media companies give to the “War on Terror”, the more it looks to the outside world that the USA has effectively hijacked the problem for it’s own ends - and I honestly don’t think that a lot of the good folk who are working behind the scenes deserve to be tarred with that broad brushstroke.

However, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, you’ve asked the question and so I’ll put up my philosophy once again for everyone to consider… In my humble opinion, the 5 Golden Ideals of stable, prosperous societies are as follows…

**(1) A commitment to civil rights across the board - for all genders, races, and sexual orientations.

(2) A commitment to world best practice education - ideally free all the way to university. (Even Thomas Jefferson subsccribed to this particular aspect).

(3) A commitment to civil institutions - and defending them at all costs. Courts, the Police, Hospitals, Social Security, Schools, and Local Government infrastructure.

(4) A commitment to property rights - and enshrining the right of property owners to pass on title to descendants in eternum. (Very important is this one - it enables to poorer classes to work their way out of poverty.)

(5) A commitment to fighting, and eradicating corruption on every front - in particular government corruption and police corruption and military corruption.**

In my personal estimation, any society in history which has consciously chosen to work towards those ideals almost always ends up in 100 years or less as being a very stable prosperous state.

Accordingly, it seems to me that we here in the Western World have to start making very serious attempts to aiding the creation of any and all of those ideals in every part of the world that we can. The goal isn’t to stamp our model on how to “go about life” on other countries, rather, by planting the seeds of those 5 ideals mentioned above, said countries can then go about building their oen local “flavours” of the recipe - and that’s not a bad thing.

Certainly, the Western World has to begin some very serious attempts at bridging the inequities of this world. The impoverished, the disenfranchised, the poorly educated - those are the fertile soils in which “terrorism” finds it’s most eager recruits. Ultimately, the real “War on Terror” has to do away with the fertile soils, as it were.

Well, that’s how it seems to me at any rate.

10

1- Open up an International forum at the UN for all countries and groups (including Al Qaida, and various Palestenian factions) to express their top 5 grievances against the formulation and conduct of the US foreign policy.

2- Open the forum to each country and factions to express whether some countries, such as Saudi Arabia run by the house of Saud, are really sovereign governments, or mere puppets of the US.

3- Open up all “Top Secret” documents of CIA, NSC, etc. for the past 50 years (since the 1953 Coup in Iran) to show the world what the US has been up to, and what are its current clandestine foreign policy plans for various countries such as Venezuela, Indonesia and others.

4- Clearly express what is the “National Interest” of the United States, and where does implementation of “US interests” stop, and the other countries’ interests start.

5- At $35,000, The GDP/Capita of US is 4 times that of Saudi Arabia. Show that US has no problem with Saudi oil price to be quadrupled to over $100 per barrel so that the average Saudi can also enjoy similar prosperity as the US population?

6- Start addressing the grievances of those countries and factions. Come up with a plan to resolve those grievances. Demonstrate to the other countries and factions that the US genuinely wants to solve the problems that breed terrorism against the United States.

7- Finally, start a nuclear disarmament program, starting with the US, and simultaneously by UK, France, China, Russia, India, Pakistan and Israel. These 8 “axis of peace” will then be responsible to insure no other country starts a nuclear weapon program.

11

Wake Up Call,

Not that I don’t applaud your statement above… But I’m afraid that if you are president and even remotely refer to the intention to come up with such a speach, you better have a very reliable group of body guards who are all twice as tall as you are and who surround you very closely day and night.

Salaam. A

12

Wake Up Call, I’d like to disagree with your plan in the strongest terms.

A special conference at the UN for the world community to bitch about the United States? Sounds dubious. Also, why would you invite Al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations? Think about the reward structure you are setting up. If a group wants the world community to listen to its grievances, all it has to do is commit a major terrorist act. Unless you plan to arrest the terrorists on the way out of the meeting, all you are doing is giving murderers a pulpit on which to spew their propaganda. Also, it would go against commonly accepted policy to not negotiate with terrorists.

And how would this eliminate terrorism?

Again, how would this eliminate terrorism? Assuming the US goes along with this, (hey, you’re the prez,) it would jeopardize the natioinal security of the US. Let our enemies know who is a spy? They’d get executed quickly. Our war contingency plans? The location of our weapons stashes? Let terrorists know where our weak spots are? Perhaps let the Iraqi militants know where our troops are, their schedules of patrol, even their informants among the Iraqis. I hate to say it, but this is simply “asking for it.” It would be similar to a football team giving their playbook to the opposition, in hopes that the opposition would be so greatful for the gesture that they wouldn’t use the information. Is complete disclosure of troops, spies, and other random spooks really a good idea for enhancing security? If you answer only one question from this post, answer this one. Why would terrorists possibly choose to ignore our security blueprints in preparation for future attacks?

I thought that the US is quite clear on what its interests are.

Why do that? The common Saudi isn’t getting much from the current oil revenues. The corrupt house of Saud would simply reap the benefits of higher oil prices, further entrenching a corrupt regime that fuels terrorism. Assuming other OPEC countries follow suit and raise the price of oil, American money would support corrupt regimes from Iran to Egypt. Of other OPEC countries do not follow suit, than Saudi Arabia would lose all of its oil profits alltogether, as the oil companies would simply take their business elsewhere towards cheaper oil.

I agree with this. We must attack the source of terrorism as well as the current crop of terrorists.

North Korea would love this. The nuclear powers have already tried to contain rogue nations from developing weapons programs. Unfortunatly, nukes cannot be “un-invented.” Someone will have them. Do you really want the only countries with nuclear weapons to be the countries that disobey international conventions?

My plan, assuming we start from the present, not from 9/11:

  1. Immediately begin developing a clean, renewable alternative to oil. Stop entangling energy policy with geopolitics. This would simultaneously put well-needed jobs into the hands of Americans, help out the environment, and give the US a less-entangled position from which to deal with the Middle East and Central Asia, a major terrorist breeding ground.

  2. Pour massive amounts of money into Iraq and Afghanistan. No matter what the cost in lives or dollars or time, it is absolutely imperative that those countries get back on their feet. Nothing breeds resentment more than destroying a country and letting the locals pick up the pieces. This, rather than tax cuts, is the best way to spend our money.

  3. Get the UN involved in Iraq. This would do four things. It would aid in international legitimacy for whatever government is set up, it would give a vessel for other countries to donate funds (the more, the better,) it would reduce US casualties, and it would free up lots of our troops to prosecute the War on Terror more vigorously.

  4. Do everything possible to resolve the Arab/Israeli conflict. Everyone knows what the final solution will look like. Unfortunatly, this requires genuine and risk-taking leadership on the parts of the Israelis and the Palestinians. The current leadership won’t cut it.

  5. End or signifigantly cut back support for corrupt regimes. Show that the US doesn’t tolerate oppression. This will be much easier with the implementation of step 1.

  6. Deal fairly with Lybia. Show that the US doesn’t hold grudges against folks that genuinely try to change.

  7. Engage Iran, but don’t put undue pressure on Iran. The country is at the democratic tipping point. The youth are becoming bolder in dissent. A broad indictment of all things Iranian will just unite the country against a greater enemy, the US. (Remember the Shah?)

  8. I would appoint a special secretary of Middle East engagement. It will be his/her job to ensure democratic change in the region.

That’s all I’ve got.

13

I would think the first step would be to aggressively attack our dependence on oil.

14

E-sabbath, How would isolating France and Belgium actually stop terrorism? Or is this just more spitting your dummy out of your stroller antics?

15

Actually, when I typed that, I was thinking more of the Cities thing that was posted a while back. That, and the thought that a strong EU may not be the best thing for the US. But it really doesn’t have much to do with terrorism, per se, excepting that if you tick the French off enough they’re liable to do something amazingly stupid. Not unlike most of the rest of the world.

Yes, on reflection, has nothing to do with terrorism whatsoever. More to do with cynical realpolitik idiocy. Ignore it.

16

Just out of curiosity, does this amazingly stupid activity after having been ticked off extend to the USA too?

17

I guess a lot of Italians (and also Germans) would rather be isolated, too - instead of being friends with this US administration…

18

Andy: Why yes, yes it does. What? I’m not stupid. I admit, though, I was thinking more of the Greenpeace incident.

T. Mehr: Now, now. No Bush bashing.

Seriously, it was just a note that we can’t get all totally terrorist paranoid, the rest of the world needs love too.

Again, Soup and Boo Boo Foo’s ideas seem headed in totally the right direction.

19

International terrorism has to be fought at an international level. The United States can’t effectively do this by itself, which is part of the current problem.

I must go back again and compare terrorism today with piracy in the 17th and 18th centuries. The plague of piracy was perpetuated by nation-states when they dealt with it individually; it was stopped when nation-states came to a common and universal understanding that piracy couldn’t be tolerated. If you want to stop terrorism, you need an international consensus that states cannot support armed insurrection, terrorism, or anything of the sort unless they’re willing to start a war over it. Period. ANY support for rebels, terrorists, freedom fighters or anything of the sort is an act of war.

All the trumpd-up invasions, INS overhauls, and reshuffling of the deck chairs at the CIA is going to mean absolutely jack shit until you reach the point of geniune international consensus. Go ahead and build a brick wall around the USA. End up like North Korea. The bad guys wi8ll just bomb England or Germany or Japan, or they’ll just tunnel under the wall. Farting around with the INS/CIA/military details is classically penny-wise and pound foolish - it missed the central problem, which is that states are willing to support non-state violence.

Of course, getting the world’s civilized nations to agree on this is going to be impossible, I suspect, until the terrorists REALLY get dangerous. Nobody’s serious about it so far; I mean, the USA itself is not fifteen years removed from supporting terrorism in Nicaragua. Nations are still willing to make that terrorist/freedom fighter distinction to justify their current means; things will get serious only when that distinction is agreed to be bullshit.

When will this happen? The world’s maritime nations only started getting serious about piracy when it got to the point that maritime commerce was being choked to death. I suspect they will get serious about terrorism only when the terrorist death toll gets into the hundreds of thousands. Maybe not even then.

20

The first thing I would do is solve the Israeli-Palestinian issue once and for all. My plan- Israel goes back to the 1967 borders and Jerusalem becomes a UN enclave, divided into sectors of religion so that Christians, Moslems, and Jews would have free access to shrines in their sectors. Neither side would like it, but a universally popular solution is impossible.

Second thing is to provide economic aid to stimulate jobs in the area. If your state is successful in clamping down on terrorism, you get lots of help in infrastructure improvements. If some nations start to prosper due to cooperation in the fight against terror, then the people in other nations may demand that their countries do the same.

Finally, I’d announce that any terrorists or their facilities that are discovered by human or satellite intelligence will be fair game for missile attack no matter where they are.