Haim, true, the Islamist fundamentalist radicals have declared war on the West a long time ago, and Huntington's predictions of a clash between the civilizations along their cultural fault-lines are coming to pass in spades.
however, i think that somewhere much earlier in this entire process mistakes were made, and i wouldn't go as far as exonerating the West from these mistakes. at one point, Bin Laden and his ilk were financed by the West to fight the communists in Afghanistan, even Saddam Hussein was financed by the West to fight Iran. we have created these monsters!
i am certainly no friend of radicals with no compunction about taking innocent human lives in the pursuit of their misguided causes, and the Taliban and the Mullahs of Iran have shown us what happens to a society in which religious fanatics become the state. however, i ask you, why do these people hate us so much? obviously we MUST have given them reason to hate us, and since it is we that have troops stationed on THEIR lands, since we went to them to subjugate them in the era of colonialism, we should perhaps ask ourselves if our standard response to deal with the problem we have created is really the right one?
no-one in his right mind can possibly believe that the coming attack on the terrorists will do anything but satisfy our thirst for revenge...that is ALL it is about! there are 1,3 BILLION muslims in the world, and if we kill 5,000 terrorists and destroy their organizations, 10,000 new terrorists with new organizations will spring up in their stead and hit back eventually.
in other words, waging this war is not about increasing our security...it can not possibly achieve that. if we REALLY wanted to enhance our chance of not being subjected to terrorist acts, we should perhaps think about what can be done about the root causes. bombing tents in Afghanistan isn't going to help one iota, especially as the country is already in ruins. we will only produce MORE radicals willing to die in the name of Allah and wishing destruction upon us.
all that said, i realize that the attack on the WTC can't be left unanswered and that people like Osama Bin Laden shouldn't get away scot free. and i can certainly not offer a solution to the problem off the cuff...it is a complex and difficult issue. but we must realize that even if we succeed in capturing Bin Laden and destroying his organization, we will not change the fact that millions of people who revere him as a hero will still hate us, and probably hate us even more than before.
it will, similar to the (totally misguided) "war on drugs" , be a never - ending war....gobbling up precious resources, diminishing our security, and resulting in the death of thousands of innocents along the way. |
