Yesterday, the world witnessed an act of war against the United States, and the world economic community. This terrible event occurred on US soil, but many foreign lives were lost as the twin towers of the World Trade Center came tumbling down. The stock exchanges of the world responded, selling off 5-7% across the board.* Our weapons have become too advanced and devastating for an all out conventional war to be fought as it was in the first two World Wars. If this is the first salvo of a sustained conflict, or a one time event, it represents a challenge to the economic forces in the civilized world. For now, we have no enemy to attack, no planes of the rising sun to identify. But perhaps this barbaric, uncivilized act will bring together strange bedfellows if the world community of nation states can take the challenge, and come together. Wars are always won by the forces of supply and demand. The allied forces won WWII because they were effective in cutting off the resources of the axis powers. While the exact perpetrator is yet unknown, we know clearly that terrorists are to blame. No terrorist group can act in a vacuum, there IS knowledge about this event out there. My fervent wish is that this attack can galvanize the world community to reject terrorism and it's allies. Hopeful evidence of this could be seen on Tuesday, as Muammar Qadhafi and Yassir Arafat were among the first to decry this act.
This war has begun on an economic front, let it be waged there. The evidence the media is reporting on leads us to Osama Bin Laden. The visceral response is to put a bullet through his head. In reality this accomplishes little. Like scraping the goo off the bottom of your shoe after stepping on a cockroach, then looking up to spy another, a simple military action alone will not solve this problem. This was an unprecedented act? Let it spawn unprecedented results. Bin Laden is reported to be a man of wealth with many resources. Make him a poor man, seize his assets and holdings. If he has money in Swiss banks, this would be a time for the Swiss government to break tradition and identify these funds. By bankrupting him, we can ruin his organizational ability, by ruining the ability of organizations such as these to carry out such an act, we have some hope for victory.
We live in an open freedom loving society, nothing resulting from this should touch that lifestyle and freedom. A team of trained, coordinated hijackers will always be able to breach whatever security is needed to carry out their missions of destruction. To think tighter controls will save us is simply an emotional response. Like a strong lock on your front door, this deters all robbers, except those willing to make the effort to break down that door. The only way to fight these sub-human animals is to attack "profitability" of such ventures. When the embassy bombings occurred, there were few repercussions... When the USS Cole was attacked, little action resulted. These were "successful" operations from the terrorists point of view. We owe it to the dead to make sure there is never another "profitable" terrorist event. We need to as a world come together, squeeze the rogue nations that harbor these vermin, and make it economic suicide to have anything to do with terrorism. The world has become such a global village, and countries are more and more dependent on their neighbors for their economic survival. Use this new found power as the weapon needed to win this war.
The victims of this and every other terrorist action from Ireland to Beirut deserve nothing less...
* If our Dow Jones industrials lose 5% this would equal a drop of 480 points
-Bo Yoder 9/12/2001 |
