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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (36120)	3/22/2004 8:31:21 PM
From: aladin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793955

Steven, We should still worry about Al Qaeda. Far more, though, we should worry about the group we haven’t heard of yet. You can bet your last peso that they are out there, and that our actions to date have only encouraged them. Pray tell what actions we could have taken that would discourage them? The ones Clinton tried, the ones Reagan tried or the ones Carter tried? We have seen criminalizing terrorism and that resulted in what? Somehow after 20 years of police work, Bush was supposed to do what exactly before 9/11? John

To: Dayuhan who wrote (36120)	3/22/2004 10:34:36 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 793955

Do you really think a suicide bomber cares about the price somebody else is going to pay for his actions? Yes, if the somebody else includes his family. Also, suicide bombing is not done by the bomber, any more than a cruise missile attack is launched by the missiles themselves. An entire military operatus is needed to prepare and launch the bombings; of which the splodeydope is merely the delivery mechanism. Those who send him do care about the extent of retaliations.

To: Dayuhan who wrote (36120)	3/23/2004 8:50:53 PM
From: frankw1900	Respond to of 793955

Steven, In your previous post you write: We don?t want to make them love us. We just want them to stop blowing us up. This is by no means impossible. How many terrorists do you see coming out of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, or Bahrain? They are as Muslim as anybody else, and if you ask their opinion, they aren?t at all happy with the US, but they are too busy making money and doing business ? much of it with Americans ? to act on those opinions There is some political headroom in these places and the rulers don't try to keep all the economic action to themselves. And they don't allow the Islamist ideologues to stifle free speech. This isn't surprising because they're moving, haltingly, (two steps forward,one step back), in a modernist direction. I do believe the US motivation is a bit more complex than, "We just want them to stop blowing us up." George Bush, however inarticulately, and his speech writers, however little credit they give people's native intelligence, do see radically enough, that conditions nurturing Islamist ideology and its concommitant requirement to attack modern people, must be replaced with modern conditions. In this post you write: We should always remember that the terrorists want to draw a large scale response from us. They do?! The declared assumption of Osama bin Laden is that the US didn't have the spirit, strength of will, whatever, to mount a large scale response to his organizations' activities, and THerefore his strategy of terror attacks on US citizens and others who are modern, will lead to Islamist success. It appears, so far, the assumption is not correct. The US chased him out of Afghanistan very quickly and he took great losses there. The US and some of its allies also have been pursuing his organizations elewhere, both in military and non-miltary ways, and doing it succesfully - many of the al Qaida organizations have been badly disrupted in Europe, N America and N Africa And it took al Qaida over two years since 9/11 before it could mount a successful attack in a Western country. And, in meantime they killed almost exclusively Muslims. The more Arab land we occupy and the more Muslims we kill, the happier the terrorists will be. That?s what they thrive on. OBL's fall back position is now that a large scale US reaction is desireable because it will make recruitment of new terrorists easier. Very similar to your statement above. I don't think that's provable in any consistent way. Iraq and Afghanistan are the examples given as proof but the Islamist terrorist acvtivity in both places seems more defensive than offensive. In both cases it appears the great threat to the Islamists is the more modern governmental arrangements the US is sponsoring with it's presence. This seems reasonable because a modern environment is ultimately deadly to Islamist ideology. Indeed, as the US entered Iraq, OBL, or someone claiming to be OBL, pleaded with the Iraqis to resist the US invasion - to dig foxholes - but Iraqis mostly haven't found the need to resist the US anymore than most Afghans have. It appears now that most of the terrorist attacks in Iraq are instigated by non-Iraqi Islamists and they are in a desperate position, as we gather from both their statements and those of the US military. It's very obvious dedicated Islamist terrorists aren't going to give up their fight even if they're denied refuge within national borders but the miltary and political action the US has undertaken in Asia and the M East has made terorrist activity far more difficult and quite likely will make recruitment equally difficult. Large-scale military force is a weapon of very limited utility in a war on terrorism. Only a fool would rely on it. Only relying on it clearly is a mistake. But as one of a number of useful tools for changing the conditions nurturing the terrorist ideology it's very powerful.