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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sig who wrote (137573)	6/24/2004 5:08:50 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Sig; Re: "Reports are that terrorist leaders are being decimated and severely handicapted by being driven undergound or into hiding. Expert leaders are hard to come by, replacements will be lacking in driven desire and skill." This is happy nonsense. It isn't the leaders that are blowing themselves up, it's the followers. Any idiot can make a terror campaign. Look at the sniper killings from last summer. Engineers have a proverb: "if your only tool is a hammer, all your problems become nails". The problem with terror is that the followers are too defuse and spread out to target with any great success. So instead we target the leaders. Since humans are naturally optimistic creatures, our leaders tell us that targeting their leaders will solve the problem. They tell us this, and many of us believe it, despite mountains of accumulating evidence that new leaders grow like grass after a rain. The Israelis have already spent decades trying to staunch terrorism by killing leaders. They're probably a lot better at it than we are, and it hasn't worked out for them. Instead, they're building a wall, but that won't stop it either. Re: "[The terrorists] seem pretty disorganized now and have begun to attack almost any country." This is not consistent with observations, LOL. As the President recently had to admit, terrorism is on the rise. Maybe it would be a good idea to wait until terrorism is on the decline before anyone gives credit to Bush for doing it, LOL. Remember when he declared "major fighting" over in Iraq? Maybe Kerry will tell us what he will do in the "war" on terror before the election, maybe not. If he does, I bet it's nothing more than more of the same. As far as changing leaders in the middle of a war, the Republicans didn't seem to think it was such a bad idea back in 1968. And the result? The new guy was convinced that he was so much smarter than Johnson that he could "win" in Vietnam, and so the war was unnecessarily continued. -- Carl