I agree that we need to fight the war abroad and at home. I am definitely not suggesting that we cut and run and build a wall around our country. I am not content to wait for the threat. The big difference is that I believe we need to root out these people one by one with intelligence, special ops forces and get to them where they live and operate. Combine this with understanding the terrorist mindset better and rebuilding our relationships around the world. This will continue to help the world as a whole fight the threat better and more efficiently.
Then we need to get out of Iraq except for ensuring their police training. Osama Bin Laden is a prophet now because he predicted we would invade Muslim lands. The situation in Iraq is an example of a bold, messy, resource intensive AND costly slap at terrorism that does nothing but encourage the underlying problems of terrorism and raise our debt. We need to fight this war around the world but it needs to be clean and aggressive. John Kerry has a great plan to put more money into our homeland security but to also double our special ops and intelligence budget for this exact task. Bush is for the cowboy way... Guns and Bombs! Yee-fucking-ha!! Overtaking, destroying and rebuilding entire countries in our image is not the answer, it is the cause.
I mentioned before these people are ghosts. They can go anywhere and do anything if they really want and they do have the will. They have done it before! They will cross our borders and live among us and the only way we can defeat them is (#1) deal with trying to reduce future terrorism and (#2) reducing current terrorists overseas while securing our country so they can't infiltrate our communities. It can't be a one sided battle overseas and it can't continue on the current path we are on. It's expensive, we have over 1/3 of our active duty troops trying to secure this mess AND while we are cleaning it up, our own borders remain open. 4000 people a day cross our borders and that is a threat. Dick Cheney said today that the biggest threat we have today is terrorists smuggling a nuclear bomb or biological weapon into our country. Whether you like to admit it or not the terrorists are already here and they are among us. We'll be fighting them at home now whether we want to or not. We need to plan for the battle.
Article comments
1 - urthshu
I don't think you're seeing it quite right, although I respect the depth of your beliefs. If you'll allow me, here's another possible take:
Not all Terrorists are necessarily formed by the conditions of injustice, per se, and in the case of Islamic Terrorism, perhaps especially so. It may be 'simply' an artifact of cultural collision.
Putting yourself in their shoes, once again: You survey your society and note with disquiet that the influence of a rich & exciting, but degenerate, foreign culture is steadily subverting your own.
You have been told, since birth, that your way of life is superior to all others. Yet, here are your children, your cousins, your females dressing and speaking in quite shocking ways. You turn on your TV, that you stuggled to give to your family, in the AM and nighttime American TV shows are on, flaunting characters that would be stoned in the streets of your villages- and you watch your daughter laugh, and you worry. Your son wants to be a rapper. You worry more.
You know that your culture cannot hope to counter this foreign one. It is rich. It reached the moon- the very symbol of your belief- and left it's mark there. Your society can't even feed it's own people. They can kill the whole world many times over, so you have heard. They're coming to crush you. And they've done it before. You know all about the Indians- they took everything from them and rubbed their memory from the face of the earth.
So what to do? Become purer than pure. Reject all that is alien and prevent- by the sword- anyone from embracing what belongs to the West. Hit the West in any way you can so that your own people will fear you and restore their former purity, which is the only thing that will return your society to what it once was.
We've seen this happen before: The Ghost Dancers, the Boxer Rebellion- both were religion-based society-wide movements we would now call 'terrorism' in the face of an overwhelming foreign culture's percieved encroachment. In both cases, the 'terrorists' embraced a concept of purity to restore society. Both movements embraced atrocity as a means to be heard, and both movements embraced mysticism as proof against technological enemies.
Both movements failed. And you know what? It took "cowboys", not spies or judges, to end them. This is not the WWIII scenario we all fear, but it is not merely a police issue, either.
2 - SFC SKI
urthshu has a pretty good grasp of the situation.
to a lesser extent than a terrorist, many Arabs I have spoken or worked with, especially those of the Arabian peninsula, the West offers a lot of great things: technology, medicine, commercial goods, physical stuff we would take for granted as routine, as well as bettter university education and offer better business opportunities, prosperity. The flip side of this is the Western lifestyle (delivered via TV to a great extent): divorce, promiscuity, lesser reliance on family, alcoholism, drug use, and surprising to some on this board, godlessness. These are the things that they do not wish to have in their society. Taken to extremes, this could lead to terrorism, but it is of course a bit more complex than I have presented.
3 - Eric Olsen
alternative perspectives are important and informative - we are talking about fellow humans, after all - but unless we are willing to utterly change our way of life, our economic system, our pursuit of knowledge, our separation of church (and not just any church) and site, ie, unless we are willing to become something we are utterly not and to reverse the arrow of human progress (I do not use this term lightly), then we are going to have to deal severely, absolutely, with those who will be placated by nothing less.
It's rather simple.
4 - Yensid Tlaw
Thanks for your comments. Regarding the comments of urthshu I don't disagree, but my rant above is targeted more on our current actions in Iraq. I agree that there are many reasons that we might be hated and most are reasons that we will never change and shouldn't. But the decision to wage war is a decision we can change if the American people demand it. There are many solutions to the problem other than war and we need to investigate them. The current state in Iraq is a mess which only encourages terrorists streaming over the boarders to fight America. If and when we get this land under control the terrorists will only use the events in Iraq to recruit in other places around the world. You really think that sending a message to these people by amassing military force is going to stop them? I highly doubt it. They might think twice though once their buddies start getting sniper bullets through their heads while walking down a street or in a secret meeting. We need to use intelligence and special ops to root these people out. They already know that we could stomp the middle east into the ground if we really wanted to. Obviously that is not stopping them.
5 - ALAHA
U TERRIROST'WHAT U WILL GET BY VOILENCE THOSE WHO HAD DONE WRONG TO U,UCOULD GIVE THEM PUNISHMENT BY WHAT UR DOING TO THE WORLD UCOULD THAT SAME WITH THOSE PERSONS .
6 - justvisiting
i need more information im doing a speech and would need information on this topic of terrorism
7 - howdydoody
If we lose the war on terror and against the radical islamists, humanity will enter another dark age that we may never see the end of.