My point is that whatever the catastrophic nature of the conflict, once it is OVER, what will the impact be in real life, day to day terms.
Some posts seem to suggest that, yes, we will be subject to daily demands that we conform our behaviour to avoid giving offense to muslim sensibilities. (That sounds llike the bomb under DC, it goes off if your whorish women don’t cover up…)
I don’t think that likely.
Well, the impact on tens or hundreds of thousands of people–maybe millions–will be that they won’t have a life anymore, or will be enduring a slow excruciating recovery in a makeshift burn ward somewhere. The economic and political effects of a nuke would be complex, but clearly disasterous. Even the relatively (compared to a nuke) small attacks of 9/11 caused a fair amount of economic upheaval.
No it isn’t. What is likely is that the public would demand a terrible and bloody revenge. Mosques across this country would be torched and a lot of innocent American Muslims would be killed or injured. A candidate running on a platform of retaliatory nuclear strikes against muslim holy sites would do well in the polls.
Look, the nuke thing is a bit of a sideshow to the OP. It wouldn’t mean a terrorist victory. I don’t think Al Qaeda’s goal of a radical fundimentalist caliphate is very likely, though I wouldn’t rule it out. But Al Qaeda, nuke or no nuke, is still capable of causing a lot of damage. The worst case scenario is something like Sam Stone imagines, along with a lot of dead people and a weakend economy.
Other bad things that might happen include an Al Qaeda take over of Saudi Arabia, causing a halt to all oil production, which in turn would cause a world-wide depression.
Again, I think a Terrorist victory, in which Al Qaeda achieves its wildest dreams, is pretty unlikely. But they can make our lives miserable. A robust and intelligent counter-terror strategy could mitigate terror, could reduce it 'till it becomes, in the words of John Kerry, a relative nuisance.
You have to think in the longer term, though. If we can’t learn to live together, what happens when terrorists have the ability, perhaps with a friendly state, to bio-engineer weapons? Or build nanotech weapons? Or attack satellites in space? This is decades down the road, perhaps, but we’re talking about reforming an entire culture here. This war could easily take 20 years or more. Think about the way technology has been advancing, then ask yourself what kinds of tools terrorists might have 20 years from now.
In the case of world security, technology is destabilizing. We currently live in a world of fundamentally different cultures and worldviews, and right now one of those cultures is populated with a percentage of militant people who would like nothing more than simply kill anyone who doesn’t think like they do. We have to convince the rest of them that this is a very bad idea before they get access to something that actually enables them to take on the job, so that they can reject the militants among them, strip them of their power, and moderate their beliefs. If they can’t do that, we’re heading for a pretty big war sometime in the next few decades, IMO.
Not money-- materialism. That’s a whole different ball of wax.
I do understand what you mean, but the moral relativist in me has a hard time labling cultural practices “abuse” regardless of how abhorrent they seem to my Western mind.
Take female genital mutilation, for instance, something that we Westerners regard withparticular horror. No religion orders it, and it’s become illegal in many places, but it still happens with terrible frequency. Nor has education campaigns seem to make much of a dent in its occurance.
Years ago, I read an article about a woman living in one of these countries who had what we would consider enlightened sensibilites. She had been mutilated as a child, and when she married, she and her husband agreed not to do this to their daughter. However, their daughter was extremely embarassed she had not been through what she saw as a rite of passage and the other little girls in their neighborhood teased her mercilessly. The girl was so tormented and unhappy that her parents arranged a fake FGM, after which the girl was very proud, and was accepted by her peers again.
Do these women want to be “rescued” from a practice they see as essential to proper femininity? What if they see it like we see breast implants? Sure, we don’t give implants to children, but nor do we arrange marriages at young ages, either.
We American women may pity Middle Eastern women for their burkas, but I bet Amazonian women pity us because we have to cover our breasts in public. We may pity them for their arranged marriages, but they probably also pity women left to raise children by themselves. We may think their men are oppressive, whereas they may feel that ours are not caring enough to be protective.
Most importantly, what if they’re happy the way they are? Do we really have the right to impose our cultural morals on another group, especially when our society has deep and terrible problems of its own?
And besides, who doesn’t like a good caning from time to time?
Lissa, again I’m not talking about social mores but about individual rights. What concerns me in a theocracy–any theocracy, not just an Islamic one–are the rights of people to practice their own lives as they see fit. Again, if ninety percent of women want to wear the Burka, more power to them. Just don’t attack and beat the ones who don’t. Hell I can’t even see that arranged marriages are any worse than the system we have here, when I think about all the miserable married couples I know. But the woman–and the man–have to have the right to opt out.
Women are only a small part of this issue. The issue is the right of people to live unmolested by an oppressive regime. You should be able to live as a hippie, a lesbian, an orthodox Jew, a shallow yuppie, a redneck or whatever. You should be able to sing, watch films, fly kites (banned by the Taliban), play sports, drink beer, and hell I’d say smoke a little pot as long as you don’t make life miserable for your neighbors.
I feel almost silly uttering these liberal platitudes. 20 years ago I would have thought only the most fanatical Bible thumper would disagree with them. But now I find myself arguing these truisms not with the extreme right, but with fellow liberals and feminists. It’s somewhat disorienting.
As far as FGM, I’ve read that story you mentioned too. To me it shows the baleful result of conformity and social pressure. I’m not a moral relativist. We humans share a common biology from which our morality is derived. Sex is one of the most wonderful things about being human. To deprive someone of the ability to experience sexual pleasure seems to me an act of unforgivable cruelty, especially when that act is committed on a child who doesn’t even understand the full potential of her future sexuality. I don’t care how customary it is.
As far as materialism goes, well I find a lot of American materialism crass and vulgar at best and dangerous to national security and the environment at worst. But I’m not going to kill a lot of people over it.
no shit. How did this happen, anyway? (not to hijack my own thread…)
Apparently the religious impulse trumps tolerance–“I’d love to let you be, but if I do, God will send me to hell, cause it says ‘thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’–sorry 'bout your luck…”…
The chances of a dirty bomb going off are higher than a full fledged nuke, yes, but the power of a nuke is the only way that the terrorists could seriously threaten us as a viable nation – which is the only way I see us “losing.”
I think you underestimate the threat of a nuke, anyway. There are huge quantities of fissile material available all over the world, frequently without adequate inventory control or protection safeguards in place. I’m not saying it’d be easy, but it’s not a fantasy to believe it could happen someday. If that idea proves too difficult they could always steal/borrow a whole device from someone (so, Iran, how YOU doing?).
It’s truly a nightmare scenario, though. Imagine what our response to such an event would be. Cornered animal, anyone? You don’t want to go there. At least when the USSR pulled the trigger you could see the bastards coming.
I would love to be able to chide you with the assurance that 2-1/2 pounds of plutonium would kick off the thousands of geiger counters standing guard on our border, if only we had some…
It is the joker in the deck.
Not that the vaporization of downtown DC would = losing, necessarily, in the WWII sense, but it would certainly take things to a new level…
I doubt they’d go for DC unless they had one to spare. New York is on the front lines.
Couldn’t they just transport it in trucks lined with lead to avoid detection?
so I am given to understand…
I wish to emphasize that I have no inside knowledge whatsoever, but I’d put my money on Houston before DC, and DC before NY (blue state…)
I think 'Sama got what he wanted from NYC. He’s moving on…