Raymond,
Like many here, I've spent too many waking hours pondering this mess. There really is only one question to ask since we've been attacked: do we have to stomach to do what it will take, over a long period of time, to eradicate these threats? If the answer is yes, then we'll be safe. If we choose some intermediate ground, such as military retaliation for those guilty (and only them) then we leave entire structures intact and poised to launch WTC II, III and IV and beyond. They will laugh at our conventional weapons, and rightly so. We will need to make deals with secular and nonterrorist factions in countries and become their funders and supporters, and do it very quietly. People didn't like that we had cozy relationships with South American dictators in the 50's and 60's? Guess what, that kind of relationship is coming back into vogue. We will have to ask first and foremost just one question about our colleagues: does our relationship with them promote our interests? With luck the relationship will promote the long term interest of that country's people as well, for it's very clear that the Taliban and Saddam and Gaddafi do nothing for their people but bring them to poverty and death.
What will we have to accept to get this done? Simple, since we won't be defeating anyone by carpetbombing anyplace, we will have to get down and dirty with the terrorists and begin to assassinate them, one by one and two by two, and their financial backers. That's right, assassinate their financial backers, people who've never held a gun in their lives. How will we find them? We will have our "unsavory associaties" find them in strings, one by one, by seizing who we know, and their families, and by means we don't want to contemplate, extracting the necessary information for the next step. Just as the terrorists knew that if they cut the throat of a flight attendant it would probably bring out the pilot, but if not, then there was flight attendant #2, and then the passengers; sooner or later the screams would bring out the pilot and they would then have the plane, so our "associates" know how to get at the people they need to get to follow the string. There will be "collateral damage" (for a definition of that term just read the passenger lists for four recent flights), and people in the wrong place at the wrong time will die, terrorists' relatives will suffer, much as the Nazi's relatives in Dresden and Berlin suffered for the crimes of those they let into power.
CBS had an incredible interview on TV last night with the mullahs in Pakistan. They were bragging about how easy it would be to bring America to its knees, how easy it would be to take over a jetliner and ram it into the White House; the interview was only a month or so old. They had Arabic posters on the wall proclaiming the UN the "bitch" of the U.S., and Osama bin Laden the glorious leader of Islam. Recruitment of terrorism apparently begins in the Mosque. I don't know the game plan for beginning this war but those guys would be a likely starting point.
Ray, you wrote, "The only problem with winning the rat race is..... you're still a rat." Perhaps, but to understand that we will have to deploy a very unpleasant and potentially toxic chemotherapy to fight cancer is simply a medical truism. We didn't start this thing, and it remains to be seen whether we will have the will to finish it. We did in WWII, with a generation weakened from the frivolous 20s and the Depression; how will this pampered and self-centered generation (I'm including my own) react?
It's not question of rats, imho, but of street fighting courage: will we raise the stakes for the other guy so high that nobody will dare? We think it's honorable to fight with fists, but the other guy has a chain; do we have the stomach to take a knife? A couple of guys in the shadows? How about we take the opponent's little brother with us and park him in a car across the street? His little sister?
These aren't the Marquis of Queensbury rules anymore. I see people with candlelight vigils, singing "Lean on Me," and it strikes me it's very much like an anti-execution watch outside a prison. How soft we've become while the world grew up hard and nasty around us.
Kb |
