Two step process.
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Kill Americans
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America reacts in the way they want America to react.
Fortunately, they’ve already been right once and we’ve already done step two. You think they’d leave us alone now.
-Joe
I don’t know you folks from Adam, but some of the statements made in this thread point out a problem that Americans have that is going to cause the war on terror to continue indefinitely by encouraging terrorism.
What I mean is this: Americans have no spine. As a country, we are like a football team playing the prevent defense, that is, preventing ourselves from winning. Winning the war on terror could happen tomorrow if the citizens of this country would come out of their figurative bomb shelter and realize that life goes on. Winning in this war is a purely mental exercise and has very little, if anything, to do with military or intelligence activities.
911 changed nothing you know. The only difference is that we now have a better understanding of our place in the world, i.e. some people don’t like us and want to hurt us. It’s always been that way and always will be. To quote from a so-so movie, ‘this is as good as it gets’. Ther is always some crank that wants to set off a bomb and not all of them are from overseas. We can either spend our time worrying about whether some terrorist might be ‘right’ or we can get on with our lives. Our fascination with terrorists is downright morbid. Rice’s comments about the terrorists only having to be right once is fearmongering at its worst (well, the terror alert system is actually worse, but I digress).
I mean, whenever you get in the car you understand that you might end up dying in an accident, burned alive when you cannot out after the crack up. Whenever you go swimming, you understand that your blue body might end up feeding the fishes at the bottom of the lake. Each of these gruesome ends is so much more likely than terrorism that it is not even funny. Any yet Americans still do them. We don’t hear jingoistic speeches on the Senate floor about how the Japanese will have to pay for their perfidy in building cars that sometimes burn when they crash.
By all means, lets improve airline and port security and keep a closer eye on what these al Qaeda folks are up to. But enough with the fear. That is for losers and I would much prefer to be on a winning team.
CJ
Two problems with your ideas.
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Doesn’t allow politicians to “save” us from anything. If they’re not “saving” us from something we might demand actions on other stuff that require debate, discussion, and decision rather than ‘blahblahblah or they’re gonna git you’
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Doesn’t allow politicians to shovel dumptrucks full of money into the “problem”. ‘Get on with your lives and stop obsessing or the terrorists have won’ (a sentiment on this board advanced by some people for quite some time) doesn’t involve a dollar expenditure. If there’s no money outlay, nothing is being “done” about the problem!
-“Joe”
This being the Pit I won’t ask for a cite, but I will call you an ignorant fuck cheerfully spewing bullshit. Al-Qaeda and similar organizations don’t hesitate to kill Muslims when they feel like it, and even in their former stronghold, Afghanistan, their like-minded hosts were a greater terror to the native Muslim population than to Americans or anyone else. They kill because they enjoy the rush of power. Interpretations of Islam just provide a veneer of justification, and can be conveniently ignored when taking out a rival who until the day before had been an ally.
Gotta say I agree with cj finn 100%.
HA! I’d like to see those damn fishes survive the chlorine in my “cement pond” style swimming pool!
Otherwise cj finn is on the money.
Yawn. Straw man.
Nobody has claimed that if the terrorists are right/lucky/succeed once, America will fall. The folks who use this argument are clearly talking about the safety of American people from terrorism: as in, to protect American lives, our government has to respond to every possible threat; but to take American lives, terrorists do not have to succeed in every single attempt, they can kill people by carrying out one more attack, whether by skill or by luck.
I’d love to see anything the OP has to offer in the way of quotes that say, “If the terrorists carry out just one more attack, America will have lost the GWOT.”
(I’m no fan of the Administration, but I think the OP either needs comprehension lessons or should stop reading into things too deeply in order to ascribe arguments that haven’t been made or even implied.)
I’m no fan of Rice, but it’s clear she means a successful attack, and nothing more. In fact I’m happy they’re saying this, since this is something they clearly did not appreciate in August 2001. Since there is close to zero achance of a total terrorist victory, I can’t imagine what else she would mean.
If that is what she is saying it just stupid. She would be saying to stop every attack we have to stop every attack.
No, she’s saying “to stop every attack, we have to be right.” “Be right” seems to mean ‘get the right intelligence, understand it correctly, and respond in the right way.’ The line makes more sense with words like ‘lucky’ in place of ‘right,’ but it’s really not hard to understand.
Then she is wrong. Our defenses are multi-leveled. We can be wrong at many levels but still stop every attack.
If she means lucky she should say lucky. But that wouldn’t play well.
I don’t think she’s saying that we need to “be lucky” every time. I think she’s saying that we need to act aggressively toward every hint of potential terrorism. That, of course, makes us most distinctly “not right” when strongly reacting to the n% of cases which were bogus to begin with, but it does tend to keep us from sitting around with our collective thumb up our butt when confronted with a non-bogus case.
You win the War on Terror by not being terrorized. By this standard, we’re not anywhere close to winning. But like cj finn says, we can win tomorrow by just not being afraid.
We have to be right at some levels to stop it.
This might be the dumbest nitpick I’ve ever gotten into around here, and you’ve already proved that you’re good at finding dumb things to nitpick.
No, stopping a major attack seems to require a coordinated effort to get and act on intelligence. A minor attack, like the shoe bomber, can be stopped by luck (and stupidity). If you get the evidence, and ignore it, 9/11 happens.
Just for the record–no cite, as I’m not doing research for this stupid topic–I believe the phrase “we [the terrorists] only have to be right once” was first used by the IRA after a plot to assassinate Thatcher was foiled.
They said it in 1984, as I said in post #6. It was a bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where Thatcher and the cabinet were having a conference. ‘Lucky’ in this context apparently meant that Thatcher and the cabinet weren’t killed - although five other people were.
must read whole thread before posting. :smack:
Ummmmm… no.
Now you’re starting to get it…
And then you lost it.
- Clearly, you don’t understand how terrorism functions. It is not about military victories, it is about setting off chain reactions of public response that change government policy. If terrorists detonate just one small nuclear weapon on an insignificant city of, say, a hundred thousand people, and it kills 10,000 people… they have not won a military victory of any significance whatsoever. The US would probably inflict a much deadlier on strike on one or more other counries. However, the US would be plunged into such internal turmoil and upheaval that it never would be the same country and would seriously contemplate withdrawing from globalism and international adventurism.
- Clearly, you don’t understand terrorist goals. The “terrorists” have told us many times exactly what they want. They want us off the Saudi peninsula, to stop supporting corrupt Arab regimes like Saudi Arabia, to stop supporting Israel’s illegal occupation and settlements, to stop military actions and occupations in places where we have no business doing so. In fact they’ve offered truces if we’ll stop doing these things, but of course we can’t know if they’re sincere because we never even tried to work out these differences. They could care less about destroying America; that’s just the rallying cry to whip up support from the stupid, uneducated classes (kind of like the US Culture Wars, War on Christmas, War on Drugs, etc).
It’s actually the current administration’s deepest fear and strongest promise of how the government would react to such an event. After one spectacular city-scale attack, freedom and democracy would essentially be finished in the US, because the people would be begging the government to cancel their liberties for security. And the government would be only too happy to deliver this “security”. So by making this implicit threat, Rice is intimidating people into pre-emptively giving up their liberties for security.
In a roundabout bassackwards way, the OP is correct. In terms of military force and civil logistics, this country could probably absorb a hundred terrorist nuclear strikes, deliver a fearsome and unforgettable retaliation, rebuild in less than a one generation, and survive a thousand more years. The size and military capacity of the US is impossible to overestimate. So considering this, it’s a pretty big fucking overreaction for the government to be monitoring my phone calls, flipping through my medical records, checking up on my library books, and nearly sodomizing me before boarding an airplane. Conservatives need to wake up and realize this.