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Politics : High Tolerance Plasticity -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cnyndwllr who wrote (8005)	9/16/2001 8:13:17 PM
From: kodiak_bull	Respond to of 23153

Fast Eddy, This thread is an education, and few educate me more than you do. I'm not sure, however, as Raymond seems to be, that if we had vacated the airbase on Saudi soil (holy Saudi soil? I thought it was mostly sand) that the madmen in search of a cause could not have gone to the next item on the list of 150 things they can't tolerate about, are envious of, and hate about the U.S. The peoples in these countries have lived in wrenching poverty, amid the rubble and the stones for 10,000 years, raiding each other, raping and pillaging their neighbors with no end. Suddenly it's America's fault they don't live in air-conditioned high rises and drive late model German cars. The level of envy and hatred, which is a marvelous basis on which to appeal to man's basest instincts (which, see, 1930's Germany, 1917 Russia and other historical times too many to recount) is white hot. The only victory will arise when the peoples of those nations learn to blame the terrorists and the dictators for their woes, and their own complicity or weakness, much as 1950s Germany learned to face the truth about Hitler and the common folk's complicity in his crimes. Our blood lust is running high, we want to capture and summarily execute all those responsible. Unfortunately, the first set of criminals all died along with their victims and worked hard to leave little trace. Their mentors, guides and cell leaders have long since gone underground. One may be working as a grocery clerk in Montreal, another a gardener in Istanbul. And for linkage, one to the other, how do we document and find the trail of an idea? This will take years and years of high quality intelligence work and information gathering, as I have noted. If the leadership understands this, and I hope they do, we won't be committing ground troops to a protracted war, but rather committing a new kind of troop, one programming computers to sort a gazillion bits of data and media to find out where the trail leads, through families and friends, from old neighborhoods and souks, through mujahadeen lists from the anti-Soviet campaign. Our agents will need to find and "question" everyone, teen recruits, family members, religious leaders and find where the trail leads. I personally think it's time to divide up the troublesome nations further, splitting Afghanistan into smaller tribal areas, splitting Iraq into, say, Kurd, Shia and Sunni principalities. But I will leave that to the more learned experts. Kb