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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (2031)	7/24/2005 8:10:46 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 540753

See my post before this one regarding measuring the utility and results of the big stick versus our goal of stopping terrorist attacks on us and our allies. I responded to it. It reminds me of the Eisenhower doctrine of massive retaliation that proved useless when the groups it was supposed to deter showed no interest in the threat. It was not "a perfect and total solution to every problem". That doesn't mean it was not a "useful tool". A hammer might not be the best tool to deal with machine scews, but its nice to have when you are working with nails and wood. A group of US-born Muslims could duplicate the London bombings in a major US city tomorrow with little effort and few hurdles to cross to achieve their aims if they chose. As far "few hurdles" note that a number of attacks where precented in the UK before the London attack succeded. I don't think that it would be quite as easy to sustain a campaign of bombings in the US. We have fewer radical Muslims (esp. as a percentage of our population) than they have in the UK. But yes such attacks could happen and they very well might. The might even happen very soon. That fact doesn't say much about "the big stick" being a useful tool. It does reinforce the idea that it isn't "a perfect and total solution to every problem", but I never said it was, in fact I explicitly said it was not. Tim