Similarly, it is when it is apparent that all of these suicidal tactics are only buying terrorists more pain, and that Allah is not favoring them against the Great Satan, that the tide will turn. People will give up their lives for a cause, but rarely for one that seems futile. As I pointed out in a much earlier post a few weeks ago, the failure of the Ghost Dance movement, and particularly of the Ghost Shirt, which was supposed to protect native warriors from Army bullets, spelled the end of native American resistance to the forces of government. Illusions rise, but they also fall........
You talk of the terrorists as though they're Wall Street thinkers who weigh the likely consequences of their actions in a logical manner and who refuse to act when the odds are horribly stacked against them. When you do so you project "our" mind set, "our" thinking and "our" values on them. That's a mistake of overwhelming magnitude.
When you write that people "will give up their lives for a cause, but rarely for one that seems futile," I wonder if you have a realistic grasp of the power of martyrdom and the appeal of insurgency. It is partly because of their pain and sacrifice in the face of overwhelming odds that terrorists have such devoted followings.
I don't question the logic of their actions; I simply accept that, while they may be illogical in many ways, their actions illustrate the depth of the terrorist's passion and the likelihood of their continuing in their deadly pursuits regardless of the apparent "futility" of their activities. It's also true, of course, that your "futility" may be their "success" since "they" measure things differently in their culture/religion.
The "failure of the Ghost Dance movement," by the way, represented a last desperate attempt by the Plain's Indians to succeed in a course that was so doomed to failure that even they recognized that only magic could save them. In the years prior to that the Indians hadn't simply been oppressed in the sense that the Iraqis feel oppressed; they'd been literally hunted down and killed, pushed off their hunting grounds and decimated by disease.
As our history reveals, the way to effectively stop armed resistance fueled by tribal loyalties or big ideas is to kill not only the resistors, but also to brutally and systematically kill their friends, their family, and their tribe. When you've done those things successfully you can then point to the symbols of your victory as turning points but the truth is that such victories come as a result of the deliberate and sustained death and destruction of the the population that supported the resistance. Do you recall the famous saying of those that killed Indian children in cold blood; "Nits make lice."
Such "conquests" might have been the building blocks of our civilization, but they're not civilized. I may be naive but it seems far more intelligent to actually recognize and deal with the valid complaints of those populations that support the killing of Americans, than it would be to decimate them the way we did the Indians.
I haven't seen much recent evidence of sustained diplomatic efforts to deal with our current problems beyond the Orwellian attempts of this Administration to, once again, spin things in a way that's designed to convince people that reality is not reality. It's reminiscent of the little men in "Mar's Attacks," running around shooting everyone while asserting "do not run, we are your friends, do not run, we are your friends." Those small failures may end up having a large cost that we'll pay for a long time. |
