Hi Sig; Re: "Why couldn't we have just left things alone, let the Terrorists take out the Sears Tower or the Superbowl. Who needs Chicago anyway?"
Who's arguing that we should do nothing? What I'm saying is that what is being tried is failing, and cannot possibly succeed.
To get rid of Arab terrorism against us, we should quit hanging around with the Israelis. That's not "doing nothing", it's simply not being a part of a conflict in which we have no real interests.
If we follow Israel's foreign policies, the result will be that we share Israel's problems. Other great countries don't suck up to Israel, and consequently haven't had themselves blown to bits by Arab terrorists. Germany, for example.
Instead, what the neoconservatives want to do is to put ourselves in harms way without the slightest chance of success. What they want is war without victory.
Our culture is very attractive. If we simply pull back from these places, they will slowly gravitate towards us, as they always have. Eventually the rest of the world will drop into the palm of our hand like a ripe fruit. But if we keep banging the tree, the day of the ripening of that fruit will be so long delayed.
What we did with the Soviet Union was to negotiate with them. We did not invade and conquer the Soviet Union. It eventually ripened, and fell into our hand like a ripe fruit. In contrast, with Cuba we instead ran an economic war against them. The result, Cuba is still communist long after the Soviet Union became democratic.
The strengths of the United States are not in military force, as far as controlling foreign civilian populations. Our ability to influence foreign civilian populations is entirely due to stuff like Pepsi and Sears.
But no, letting history follow its natural progression isn't good enough for the conservatives. Instead, they have to "do something", even if that something demonstrably sets us backwards.
On September 9, 2001, Al Qaeda got lucky. And the US declared war on terrorism. How has it gone so far? The sad fact is that there have been far more Americans killed in terrorist actions after September 10, 2001, then were killed in the corresponding 15 month period before September 8, 2001. Our soldiers die daily in Iraq. Even Al Qaeda's is killing more of us now than they did before the WTC attack, and what's worse, our own actions have influenced even more Arabs to take up terror against us.
-- Carl |
