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Sci-fi Writers Join War on Terror
yoyoq writes "Homeland Security is looking for suggestions from sci-fi writers. "Looking to prevent the next terrorist attack, the Homeland Security Department is tapping into the wild imaginations of a group of self-described "deviant" thinkers: science-fiction writers."
Here's a suggestion: 9-11 could have been prevented with locks on the cockpit door."
Here's a suggestion: 9-11 could have been prevented with locks on the cockpit door.
Everyone's a snide little clever genius after the fact.
Here's a suggestion: no, it could not have been prevented with locks on the cockpit door. It would have likely been a somewhat different attack, but it still would have happened.
Meanwhile, people still catch colds despite having a supply of tissue in the house.
Here's an idea, why not stop wasting time on this sort of, headline grabbing, nonsense and sort out the existing agencies who are supposed to be responsible for this sort of thing so they can gain some actual intelligence about what the terrorists are actually planning and actually do something to stop that.
If Homeland Security really are trying to think of more innovative solutions they might consider putting a stop to some of the activities the US is or has been involved in which tend to increase the number of available terrorists wanting to attack it. This might involve stopping the CIA kidnapping people and taking them off to be tortured, stop starting pointless wars and stop interfering in other countries in order to install regimes that suit your own purposes.
Our sense of risk is so badly out of whack that we're just being ridiculous--it isn't even hysteria anymore, not after this many years. We're being suckered by a sensationalistic media working in cohorts with government, which always, always wants more power. I'd say it was shocking if I could even muster any surprize at how stupid we're being over this.
Pilots would be blackmailed into opening cockpit doors at the threat of killing everyone in the cabin. Terrorists would learn lock picking. WTC would be brought down by a big truck with explosives instead of planes. Al-Quida would carry out a chemical or biological attack. Let's face it, targets are endless and internal security is only a small part of preventing terrorism. Withdrawing from Israeli-Palestinian conflict on one hand and refusing to do any business with Islamic countries on the other would deprive terrorists of both recruits and resources and have a much bigger effect on new attacks. We can also distinguish religious freedom from calls for violence against everyone and deport or deny visas to extremists of every faith - muslim, christian, scientology, falun gong...
The bogus threat of terrorism has been the greatest bonanza for greedy and power-hungry politicians in recent US and world history. So why would they give that up now?
It worked in Footfall but the world was being attacked by aliens in that book. Saudi terrorists are not aliens and I don't think Larry and Jerry are the best people to call on unless you want to be told to strike back with an Orion pulse rocket.
Given a more real world scenario I suggest the Homeland Security Department look to people who really were thinking ahead during the 70's and 80's and ask them to think ahead from now.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
This group is a professinal think tank, those in the picture all look over 55, and to be a member you need a technical doctorate degree. How much of a "deviant" thinker or "rebel" can they really be? Aren't people that come up with the most inventive and "crazy" ideas a bit younger? I like the idea of employing think tanks, it shows initiative which is vital, but if they really want some results I think they're going to have to attract a different set of thinkers.
I think by then the lady with the 3 screaming kids would have been shot, the pilots forced to jump without parachute because of the rocky stormy weather, the stewardesses raped in the toilets and half the plane actively being recast in an episode of some epic Western hollywood production everyone suddenly remembers..
Remember, everyone has limits to his civilized upbringing. It's hard to get that across to people who like guns and who think themselves as shiny examples of western society. The truth is that they are all terribly and sorrowly mistaken on the day "an accident happened".
now, I have no idea I should whish for that day or not..
With great power comes great electricity bills.
Leaving aside the Monday morning quarterbacking there is ample evidence to suggest that the "ideas" of 9-11 from the tactical nature of the attacks to the identities of the attackers was in fact known or knowable. Al-Quaeda was, in fact on the intelligence community's radar screen and warnings about Osama Bin-Laden were prevalent even in Presidential Daily Briefings. Additionally there had been an exercise simulating exactly the kind of attack that occurred. So it wasn't that the idea had not arisen or that noone had suggested things.
Rather, its apparent that the suggestions were ignored. Whether they were ignored because Bush wanted to focus on other things or that the nature of the ideas somehow rendered them ignorable is unclear. What is clear is that they were, in fact, present and had been suggested.
Post 9-11 a great deal of effort has been spent on garnering "ideas" for attack styles on the grounds that "we didn't know". While it is nice to see people expanding their minds it is a little worrisome that they have not done so before. It is also a little worrisome because the new ideas seem to fall into two categories, those that get ignored and those that are overreacted upon.
In the former class we have things such as not throwing children year olds into Guantanamo Bay, and adding armor to protect our troops against IEDs (something that was so badly rejected that the solders were ordered by the White House to remove armor that they had added in the field). A great example of the latter comes from one of Bob Woodward's books on Bush. Some of you may remember that point about a year or so ago when the terror alert levels jumped and new, ominous, warnings came out about Al-Quaeda hijacking trains and filling them with chemicals. It turns out a bunch of guys were sitting around a meeting and one of them said: "You know it would suck if Al-Qaueda stole a train and loaded it with chemicals..." A few days later they lock down all the train stations.
So with all due respect to DHS's desire for new info but I'd like to see them make better use of what they've already got.
Wasn't the title of one of the reports presented to Dubya prior to 9-11 "Terrorists plan an attack on American soil with commercial airliners" or something like that? Don't have to be a sci-fi writer to interpret that... So, "reading and complying with warnings" might be a place to start. And for those that think terrorism is an Islamic problem: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518, 476599,00.html (500 Terror Attacks in EU in 2006 - But Only 1 by Islamists)
I think that Michael Moore said it best: You cannot win the war on terror, because you cannot go to war with a noun.
How about a sane foreign policy? Like cockpit locks, it won't prevent all terrorist attacks, but less bullying and more actual diplomacy will help. It also wouldn't hurt to examine economic policies and disproportionate consumption of resources. America is a colonial power by fiat and as long as that is so, there will continue to be terrorists.
The sci-fi angle is just silliness, in my opinion.
Rather than screening people coming into the USA why not screen people leaving the USA.
You could come up with a standardised "AQ" (Asshole Quotent) score and refuse exit to anyone scoring more than 100.
Answering "Yes" to questions like "Do you believe there should be Starbucks outlet in every culturaly important site" gets you five points.
Aswering "Yes" to a question like "Do you believe it is acceptable to shout out 'Does anyone in this joint speak English' when visting a foriegn art gallery" get you ten points.
Answering "Yes" to a question like "Do you believe its wrong to provide condoms to people who are HIV positive" gets you 50 points.
By screening people leaving your country in this way you could promote the illusion that USAians are polite considerate respectfull people and you hatred and bombs would be better directed at Candadians or Swedes.
Also candidates for high office could boast about thier high scores come lection time.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
We're flat out of fanciful terrorist ideas to scare the public with and need some new ones. Have you got any? Don't worry if they sound totally implausible, once we're finished sprucing them up only the unpatriotic will be laughing at them.
Yours,
Authorities
While I agree with your sentiment ( "The terrorist threat is hyped" ), there were these little incidents. Oklahoma, the first WTC bombing, even Beirut in '81 if you count attacks abroad.
"Failure of imagination" is just dumb. There's always another threat.
The way to improve security is to have well-trained guards in vulnerable places, looking for anything out of the ordinary, combined with investing far more heavily in recovery and response. As Schneier notes, this is generally beneficial as it helps with natural disasters and other unforeseen events as well as terrorist attacks.
Of course, the real way to stop terrorism is to get everyone to watch videos like this one.
Erh... I think there have been a few terrorist attacks, on US embassies for example, before 9/11. Also, the towers were the target of a terror attack before. Not to mention the "domestic terror" that existed before the coordinated attack.
And, quite frankly, if I wanted to conduct a terrorist attack on the US, it would be far from impossible. Maybe a stunt like 9/11 is incredibly hard to pull through today, but small scale attacks akin to those in Israel would be no biggie. If an outsider really wanted to, he could terrorize the US, easily. A bomb in a shopping mall, how would you even want to avoid it?
In reply to the "see?", I think pretty much everyone here will get the hint when I say, I'm willing to sell you a stone...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't live over there, so I'm not changing anything. But I think some intelligent people over in the US should really start making those very valid points. Talk to your friends and family, and make it clear how utterly irrelevant it is to be worried about terror. Unless terrorists obtain nukes or other WMD's, terror is a complete non-issue for the average joe. Like spending your life fearing that you should be suddenly killed by lightning.
Oh, and if you're taking the global perspective, try these numbers: around 24.000 people die every day due to hunger. Though americans may be annoyed if you take that perspective too far. If disasters were measured solely in terms of human lives lost, 9/11 wouldn't be the headline even on the day it happened.
I lost my sig.
as always, the suggestions given here are solutions to symptoms, not the desease.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
People are totally innumerate and they overreact to rare, dramatic events. Everyone went nuts over the VT tragedy because it was "the worst school shooting in history" even though it only killed 30+ people. That's less than an average day's worth of gun deaths, or about six hours of car accidents. Now it's almost six years later and people are still overreacting to 9/11. I mean, 3000 deaths in one day and at the same place is impressive, but it still totals to just one month of car accidents. Think of how miserable we've made ourselves since then. Was it worth it?
Asking "whether the next 9/11 can be prevented" is a dumb question to try to answer. It's like "how do we prevent the next car accident?" The sort of questions we should be asking sound cold and calculating, which is unfortunate because it keeps us from asking them:
- Is it possible to reduce the number of terrorist attacks?
- Is it possible to reduce the number of terrorist attacks to zero?
- What is the probability per year that a terrorist act might affect you?
- What is the probability per year that our self-flagellating counterterrorism efforts might affect you?
- Since 9/11, how many additional hours of your life have been spent in airports?
- How many years of your life have been spent as a soldier overseas?
- How many years of your life have been lost as a soldier overseas?
- Is terrorism even something most of us worry about personally anymore?
It's unfortunate that we have created security monsters like TSA that simultaneously don't work and would be political suicide to get rid of.
My own idea for "preventing the next VT tragedy" was to crack down on the manufacturers of doors, not the sellers of handguns. If it were illegal to manufacture doors with closed loops in their handles, the guy wouldn't have been able to chain the door shut.
you're still not focusing on the disease, and that's fundamental inequality and slavery in this world.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Actually, DHS does not seem to be particular effective or efficient at anything it does. It's not just FEMA; what about that guy with TB that got back into the country by flying to Montreal and driving through a border checkpoint?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Yes, but it's a lot easier to declare war on a concept that (more or less by definition) you can't beat by shooting at than it is to solve world hunger and abolish inequality over the entire planet.
Or, to put it another way (for those who still think the US is doing well in Iraq): Think of terrorism like a vicious, unpredictable animal that wants to attack you. That's easy enough. But there's a twist: it gets stronger every time you shoot at it, bomb it or do anything violent towards it. Why are you still shooting at it?
As TFA notes, the 9/11 commission said the attacks were a result, in part, of the government's "failure of imagination". SF writers, unlike some beltway bureaucrats and politicians, aren't lacking in that, at least.
I think that comment very often gets taken out of context in order to justify exotic anti-terrorism schemes. It wasn't a "failure of imagination" in the sense that nobody in their wildest dreams thought that it could happen. I mean, let's face it, there's nothing far fetched about smuggling weapons onto a plane. That's why they have metal detectors at the gates. There's nothing far fetched about hijacking a plane. That's happened dozens, if not hundreds of times, in the past 30-40 years. There's nothing far-fetched about suicide bombers. They blow themselves up on a daily basis in the middle east. There's nothing far fetched about attacking the WTC. That had already happened once. The only "failure in imagination" is the failure to believe that terrorists would combine their most effective and well-known tactics into a single act.
But the worst part is that the "failure of imagination" wasn't the reason that 9/11 happened. It was the failure to prevent people from smuggling weapons onto planes and hijacking them that allowed 9/11 to happen, and those are threats that have been around for a very long time.
It's like Bruce Schneier has said many times, if you're spending time and effort in trying to prevent hollywood movie-style terrorist attacks instead of the routine, more effective (and much more likely) types of attacks, then you're probably wasting your time and resources. We're far more likely to end up with car bombs blowing up bridges or suicide bombers blowing themselves up at shopping malls than we are to end up with some exotic antrhax-infected mutant sharks with laserbeams. Hell, a handful of Beslan-style school attacks executed simultaneously across the US would probably have as big of an impact as 9/11 (look what happened with the relatively minor Virginia Tech incident), and it would probably be easier to implement too.
Let everyone onboard with any weapon (firearm) they are legally permitted to carry otherwise.
From my European perspective this is a Bad Idea. More innocent people are shot in the US than anywhere else in the world.
might as well arm the pilots too while we are at it.
Not as crazy as you think. Some people need to carry guns for their occupations (cops, for instance). What might happen is demonstrated by the case of an armed pilot of Garuda, Indonesian airways. Things more or less evolved in the following manner:
Hijacker (as he enters the cockpit): "This plane is hijacked!"
Pilot (shoots the hijacker) : "Not anymore."
Not a single passenger got injured.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
"...But there's a twist: it gets stronger every time you shoot at it, bomb it or do anything violent towards it. Why are you still shooting at it?..."
Very simple! Our jobs depend on there being a vicious animal that wants to attack us. This was fine during the 60s, 70s and 80s, and we had good job prospects. We got lots of established government funds.
Then, in the 90s, our vicious animal suddenly died on us. We were stuck. We weren't just going to quietly retire. We tried to invent drug barons, organised crime, and minor foreign countries as a new vicious animal, but it wasn't the same.
Now we have Islam! If we had been clever, we could have encouraged this ourselves, and paid Osama to crash those planes. We probably didn't, not because we wouldn't, but because we didn't have the foresight. But now it's happened, we're back in clover.
And we're damn well not going to mess this one up. It's going to last a long time, just like the Russian animal. Have you noticed how we insist that speeches are made stressing that this willl be a 'long haul'? Too right. We're not stupid. Everyone told us that invading Iraq would make things worse. Why do you think we did it?
Well, this is certainly a good brute-force approach. The problem, of course, is that there are a lot of vulnerable places. Schools, shopping malls, stadia, airplanes, hospitals, large buildings, bridges, factories, food processing plants, ports, power plants, electrical grid, network control centers... and the list goes on. So that means millions of guards. Possibly tens of millions. Assuming you're actually going to protect vulnerable places with well-trained guards. In a modern technological densely-populated society, that's a lot of places to protect.
Now if you want well-trained, highly competent guards, you're going to have to pay them more than the typical rent-a-cop rates. That'll be expensive. You'll have to arm them (with at least non-lethal weapons).
Let's say you only need 2.5 million guards in North America. (well under 1% of the population). Of course, they only work 40 hours a week, so you're looking at just over 4 shifts. OK, 10 million guards. Well-trained, highly competent, so you'll probably have salaries of around 50k, and support infrastructure and overhead that doubles that. 100k/year. That's a trillion dollars a year.
Is that really the best way to improve security? I can think of a lot of ways other than spending a trillion dollars on 'well trained guards in [all] vulnerable places'.
And you'll have something much closer to a police state -- either they'll be government guards or corporate guards.
And if you miss just one vulnerable place, then the approach fails. No, I'd rather apply intellect and thought to the problem rather than try and brute force it. I'm not sure the SF writers are the way to go, but I think it's a lot better than going the police state road and spending a trillion a year for the privilege.
-Holmwood
The science fiction writers mentioned are all a bit "cult". I like Niven's work, but his science is three dimensional and his sociology is two dimensional. The sort of person I would be looking to to advise the DHS would be more like Umberto Eco (read _Il pendolo di Foucault_/_Foucault's Pendulum_ to see what I mean.) Eco is a genuine polymath who has thought long and hard about cults, society in general, and the way different societies represent their beliefs.
My own belief is that to win a war against terrorists you need psychology and sociology as your core disciplines. This is what the US and Israel simply do not understand, because they have a gun mentality (i.e. project power remotely at an enemy) rather than a net mentality (catch your enemy and make him do what you want.). Northern Ireland is a battle that was won largely by psychology: getting the IRA to believe that it was infested with traitors, so it turned on itself, while persuading the leaders that democracy offered them better opportunities for status and respect than being seen as having gunmen at their command. Psychology is not, in fact, the soft option, nor is sociology.
The US, and Israel, do not seem to have grasped that the only way to stop chaotic, uneducated young men from behaving in an extremist way is to provide opportunities for the people who can possibly control them. Israel believes it can ultimately destroy all Palestinians, so sees no need to offer them a way out which makes renouncing violence attractive. The US believes it can win the "War on terror", so sees no need to create ways in which the controllers of the fundamentalists can get attention and status that exceeds what they get now in their tribal societies. That's a strategy for the long haul, but while the US refuses to be bound by treaties and, for instance, recognise the ICC, it is walking away from frameworks that could be made to enhance security.
Meanwhile, every time Bin Laden reads about another Homeland Security cock-up, or the cost of the Iraq war, he can convince himself that, even without actually killing Americans, he is damaging their economy, their prestige, and their political influence around the world. He is, in fact, largely succeeding through psychological warfare, which is in itself a good advertisement for its success rate.
Pining for the fjords
Teach security at school.
There is only one way to get the point to a American: blow something big up. So if you want to reach the teaching system one has to blow it up.
WW1: A German U-boat sank the British liner Lusitania in 1915, with 128 Americans aboard.
WW2: Blow up pearl harbor. 2403 fatalities)
War against terrorism : Blow up a building in New York and kill 2,974
So one should blow up something visible to get US attention. ( 3000 people so something like that)
If someone decides to blow up a school or 2 in the US, US will respond by putting a big fence around every school and applying extreme access control that will make look like north-Korea a place or freedom.
Result:
-Americans spend so much on security they will loose the economic war.
-Children will learn security at all cost is important and privacy or personal life is less important.
-Security firms will earn BILLIONS.
So it is not hard to let the next generation of Americans live their life in fear by just a few well placed attacks.
I'm not a Sci-fi writer but here is what I suggest:
Hello! We are not in a movie or a video game. We live in The Real World. People realy die, people realy suffer. We can't just rewind the movie or restart the game.
If you don't want someone to hurt you, don't be his enemy.
Put more simply: The president may be a tool, but that doesn't mean that the people he's railing against aren't also tools, or even much worse than he is. That's the biggest problem I have with "progressives" in this country -- they think evil or incompetence is a kind of zero sum game. If the president of the US is bad, his enemies can't *really* be all that bad, which is totally untrue.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
This is an overly simplistic view. The people that orchestrated the war in Iraq were not doing it out of any fear of job security. Obviously neither the position of Secretary of Defense, Vice president, or Deputy Secretary of Defense are going to go away if we aren't locked in a state of ever present war. It may be true that corporations in the defense and arms business have a vested interest in fomenting world conflict, but to imply that Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz et al led us to war out of some perceived fear that they would become useless organs of government is ludicrous.
They went to war because they thought they could win easily, and it would be a good idea. They were wrong, on a number of levels, but that doesn't mean they're happy about or moreover intended the current situation over there, and to imply anything else, like I said, is pretty ridiculous.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
Bingo! Why do you suppose Bush is proposing South Korea as a model for Iraq? We've had troops in South Korea since the early 1950s. That's right. Almost 60 years. Terrorism is the new bogeyman. Nevermind that we don't actually need one with Iran, North Korea and China all ready to push the nuke button at us. It's just that unlike Iran, North Korea and China, terrorism is easy to put a face to for the American public: Osama bin Laden. Let's face it: the idea that another 9/11 could occur scares the crap out of us. Now I don't know that the government didn't pay Osama to crash those planes (Bush isn't that bright, but there are those in the CIA and NSA who are). But I don't know that they did. What I do know is that the government has been using 9/11 to take away all of our Constitutional rights, to garner public support for massive amounts of military and intelligence spending, and to basically keep us all afraid so that it appears that we have no choice but to trust that the government will protect us. Which maybe they can't. And that's what you should be afraid of.
My blog
I think he was saying that Flight 93 crashed because the people on board it stood up, realized something was going on, and fought for themselves.. not that they specifically had firearms.
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
I'd say that saying "fundamental inequality and slavery is the cause of all terrorism" is as simplistic as saying "They hate us because of our freedom."
Let me go off on a minor tangent here, bear with me: The direct purpose of terrorism is to exact a response. The indirect purpose is to use the results of that response, where the results could be any number of things. In the case of 9/11, the clear purpose of the attacks was to cause America to react - nobody could possibly be so stupid as to think the most powerful country on Earth would just ignore thousands of its civilians being killed on its home turf. The only place America was likely to react was the Middle East. Therefore, very likely the purpose of 9/11 was to get the most powerful country on Earth to do a bull-in-a-china-shop act in the Middle East.
Why would OBL want that? OBL's direct aim is not to bring peace and prosperity to Palestine. It's not to ensure oppressed Muslims in Saudi Arabia worship on their own terms rather than the Saudi Royal Family's. It's not to make Afghanistan a modern, wealthy, state able to take care of its citizens. OBL's aim, as expressed repeatedly, is to create an Arab superstate, overthrowing the local governments there, and creating instead a single Islamic nation.
What does any of that have to do with inequality and slavery? Not a great deal. It's all about power, and it's a power struggle between the entrenched incumbent elite and a body that disagrees with them. But the disagreement isn't over the relatively lack of equality, it's a disagreement over an entirely different issue of religious and political significance. Insofar as equality is a factor, OBL feels obliged to use terrorism to achieve his aims because he doesn't have an army.
But if he had an army, he'd use that instead. Equality wouldn't prevent the war, it would just change how its fought. Which isn't really what, I think, you meant.
It's very tempting to look at terrorism as being purely a last resort of the oppressed, but it doesn't always work like that. Terrorism is frequently merely the first resort of those who want power over others, but do not have it yet.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
While I don't disagree with your point that the enemy is bad, even if the President is an idiot, there are plenty of places in this world that are in far worse shape than Iraq was under Saddam Hussein. You've heard of Sudan right? The President just made some sort of speech about it, several years after we learned about the problem and over a year after his administration claimed they would do something proactive about it.
And lets not get into Indonesia and all the problems there that we could have helped with, or Tibet, or Nepal. You do know there was essentially a civil war in Nepal for the last 10 years right? Oh, and the monarch disolved the parliament and basically imposed martial law on the place. What about Thailand, and the military coup that just occured?
Yes, Saddam Hussein was a bad man doing bad things. The point is, however, he was an "evil" we understood how to deal with. He was essentially no threat to anyone but himself and his own people. Yes that's bad, but his conflict wasn't causing issues any different than the others that have been going on at the same time. We did however decide to put on our big boy shoes and step in his playground to pick a fight with him as opposed to others. Why? Because it was a name people recognized (so even if it was the wrong choice at least some people would support it on name recognition alone), it was a profitable place to pick a fight, and it was during a period of economic "recession", which always calls for war. It's the great economic provider for the USA, and has been for a very long time. I won't even speculate at the personal economic gains of the administration, which others probably have far more information about.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Yes they can. Just use an imaginary or real external threat, tell them that any measures are just for their own security, and denounce anyone who doesn't agree with that as "unpatriotic".
Or just bring bigger guns.
Even if that idea were a success, it only takes a few of those guards to be working with "the bad guys", and all hell's going to break loose. The "bad guys" aren't stupid - they don't spend all their money on tanks to drive at armoured columns in hopes of beating them - they spend them on IEDs, RPGs, and suicide belts, and get far more bang for their buck, literally.
The only way to stop this is to not be a target. Don't do stuff to others you wouldn't like done to you. Listen. Talk to folks so they don't have to blow up stuff you like to get your attention. For example: the Brits spoke to the IRA, even after the IRA were terrorists, and now the IRA isn't blowing up trucks full of explosives in London. It's not as if terrorists don't have stated goals - Al Qaida have said a million times what's pissing them off, and yet we don't do a damned thing about it. Americans would be pissed off if, say, China put a shitload of Chinese troops in America during a brief spat with Canada, and then didn't take them away afterwards, yet we expect Al Qaida to roll over and just take it when we do it to them. I'm not supporting any kind of violence towards anyone - that's doomed to fail. Talking is the way forward - it's what people are good at, and it fuckin' WORKS.
The IRA went out of business because the social primates in Ireland were getting fed better when they restored their economy and did it fucking SO WELL that with a quality of life going higher there was no need to go attack the tribe with more resources in the next valley. Going to war is a species-typical behavior. Activated by an environmental switch (I will get less food). Mediated by xenophobic memes ("Allah u-Akbar" ... "Oust the uncatholic invaders" ... "Dieu et mon droit" ... "Terrorists! Kill kill kill!" ... whatever).
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.
being overly optimistic on the ability of Democracy/Republic style of governments being the solution to the problem.
The representative form of government is the best solution for the problem; the sticking point in Iraq is the implementation, because the vast majority of the locals have to really want it--and want it at almost any cost--if it's never been in place before. Look at every nation, from the birth of the United States to former Soviet republics now trying a representative government that is more democracy than rubber stamp. The rich, the poor, the working class, the business owners, everyone has to want to make it work. And a key component to that is one thing that you will rarely, if ever, read or hear about in the popular news media: cultural integrity.
One of the major problems in Iraq is the simple fact that the cultural bias is to never be 100% honest, because recent history shows that will more likely get you killed or your family killed than not. Until we find a way to not only encourage but to actually get the leaders in Irag at every level of government to be as close to 100% honest, as close to 100% of the time about their intentions as well as their actions in order to be role models for the Iraqis (and Iranians and Syrians and Turks and Kurds and every other local ethnic and political group with an interest in Iraq), democracy is never going to "thrive" on a scale comparable to any given Western government.
They did win easily. Saddam was toppled in a matter of minutes. But it's becoming blatantly apparent that they were more interested in a prolonged conflict, so they can deluge money on all the defense contractors and other direct supporters of the current administration. Once the money reaches Iraq, there is no legal accountability for anything. If you receive money to build a school, and don't, there's nothing illegal about it as long as you put up a half-assed attempt at trying to build one. (Meaning if you rented a bulldozer and claimed the security for it bankrupted you, you're off the hook.) Heck, 360 tons of cash went missing and the public did nothing about it.
After reading up on how the Department of Homeland Security was basically turned into the equivalent of a government contractor eBay, it seemed to confirm it. I've been told that the standing orders from the people who work there are that the department is not allowed to do anything themselves, they must contract everything out. So again the main focus seems to be funneling money to the contractors.
Contrary to the national media image (which by the way is controlled by their supporters) this administration is not dumb. This administration is quite adept at funneling money from the taxpayers to the contractors. All the rest of what they're doing just seems to support and protect this goal of theirs. As for Gitmo and "getting tough" on terrorists, they just know what show their base wants to see.
Gene Roddenberry: Strive for equality among humanity, do away with the pursuit of personal wealth as a career choice, dedicate our resources to knowledge and greater understanding instead of developing petty differences into financially successful military endeavors.
Just a thought.
#SickNotWeak
Put more simply: The president may be a tool, but that doesn't mean that the people he's railing against aren't also tools, or even much worse than he is. That's the biggest problem I have with "progressives" in this country -- they think evil or incompetence is a kind of zero sum game. If the president of the US is bad, his enemies can't *really* be all that bad, which is totally untrue.
Any references for that sweeping generalisation? Let me clue you in. Your average progresssive spends most of his time bitching about Bush and not bitching about, say, Osama Bin Laden, because unless you're a complete retard, it's common knowledge that OBL is a scumfuck of the highest order, whereas Bush is nominally not supposed to invade sovereign countries, spy on his citizens, etc.
That's why it seems to you to be that way.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
The IRA were from Northern Ireland, not Eire. The IRA stopped fighting when they received representation in the discussion that they were trying to take part in. Once that happened, the violence didn't make sense, as they were fighting people who were trying to help them, and they stopped. If you think the conflict was due to food, you are hundreds of years out of date. But nice try.
Maybe the first thing to do would be to understand what the word "terrorism" means. Hint: It's not killing soldiers.
terrorist themselves that the more you attack them the stronger they get.
This is patently not true and any examination of the history of various 'terrorist' movements will demonstrate this. The error arises from the elementary failure to observe that regimes do not 'win' power - the old regime loses power and is replaced.
The distinction between terrorists and revolutionaries is the the revolutionary "swims like a fish" in the ocean of the population, to quote Mao (who probably pinched that from Sun Tzu),and is a populist engaged in activity that receives support from the population. The terrorist never has moral legitimacy and reflects only a set of values that belong to a specific group. The IRA, despite a revolutionary history and support from the nationalist community recognised this and eventually sued for peace in an unwinnable war. The Red Army Faction simply became extinct and The Angry Brigade vanished into the dustbin of history.
Terrorist activities have never been succesful against oppressive regimes - both the Third Reich, The Soviet Union in the past and Robert Mugabe's dictatorship in Zimbabwe in the present (just to lump them altogether) were not and are not fearful of them.
The military whether you like it or not, have underpinned every civilisation since the year dot. It is the oldest organisational type and it has a natural longevity. The Red Army of the People's Republic of China is one of the main players in the present neo-capitalism of China. The British Empire and present day British society is a complex merger of families with connections on all of the principal elements of the legislature, the executive and the military. This connectivity is reflecting in most of the West.
The Roman Army managed to survive for some time after the ultimate collapse of the Roman Empire. No society existed for more than ten minutes in the absence of a military.
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Bovine Fertilizer. There's plenty of arms in Iraq. Plenty of violence, too.
And I don't see martial law in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, or Canada where there is much stricter regulation of handguns.
the citizens are fighting for their homes. the soldiers are there because they were told to be there. That is a huge difference. If we got our asses out right now, the terrorist groups would be slaughtered in the street. American soldiers are invaders and therefore are solidifying the alliance between the locals and the terrorists. Eliminate the universal enemy and the terrorists would be slaughtered by the locals.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I actually agree with your analysis. Almost completely. But you're missing a key aspect by focusing on Osama bin Laden. ObL is a leader, and this may describe his position - but it doesn't describe the position of the suicide bombers, the foot soldiers, the 9/11 hijackers themselves. In other words, why does anyone listen to ObL (or any similar person - why does anyone listen to Bush for that matter?).
The simple fact is that life for the lower classes in most of the world varies from difficult to an insane hell. This includes presumably advanced nations like the U.S. where it may be merely difficult compared to Saudi Arabia, but its still not something people would choose on its own merits. People have been looking for solutions for a long time, and some of those solutions have had mitigating effects on poverty and oppression, but certainly have not eliminated the deep problems that come with being on the bottom. The worse life on the bottom of the food chain becomes, the more desparate people get, and the more they want to lash out - moreover, the worse things get, the less they have to lose.
There's a passage in the movie Syriana that sums up what I think is going on for a lot of lower and middle class youths in the most oppressive nations - I'm just paraphrasing because I have a horrible memory for detailed quotations:
Communism has failed, capitalism and liberalism have failed. None of the ideologies have lived up to their promises that they would make a better life for us and our families. Things continue to get worse. We must understand we have always had the solution - the Koran tells us what to do, how to live in such a way as to make life better. But we have abandoned our faith. Only by going back to the old ways, the ways of faith, will things improve.
This is (again paraphrased) spoken by a terrorist recruiter roping in teenage boys. ObL, Bush or any other leader can scream all they want, and no one will go fight if the people themselves are convinced that the external threat is threatening them or keeping them from a better life in some way. Most of the terrorist/insurgent/what have you foot soldiers, I suspect, are not engaged in high-level thought about caliphates and theocratic political models. What they are is pissed off that they and their friends are oppressed and dying because of the local tyrant or his foreign allies, and someone has offered them an answer. When the U.S. comes along (whatever the leaders intentions) and bombs the hell out of their town, or soldiers kick their doors in an treat them like criminals, that answer starts to look increasingly correct - at least, its an option that gives them something they can do.
The question isn't why the nutball extremists hate us. Yes, we could do things to give them fewer legitimate reasons to hate us, but we'll never do away with all terrorists by simply being nice. The important question is why do those nutball extremists find it so easy to get support and financing? That's a question we can much more easily deal with, and it has a whole lot more to do with how we act and how we're perceived in the world than a lot of people want to admit.
The fact is, there will always be violent extremism. We have our own homegrown terrorists in the US. The difference is, they're so far out on the fringe in the US that it's hard for them to operate. They don't get millions in donations, and their neighbors don't look the other way when they start building bombs. The fact that the situation isn't so great elsewhere is largely a product of the fact that we've managed to lose the PR war so spectacularly that it's not uncommon for people to think that organizations like Al Qaeda are actually fighting for justice.
We're losing a PR war to the types of people who behead reporters and blow up vegetable markets, and we're losing that war because the people of the middle east have their own media now. We can't say one thing and do another because we're going to get called on it. They're not relying on CNN and the BBC for the scoop anymore. They didn't watch the siege of Fallujah from the outside on CNN like we did. They watched it from the inside on Al Jazeera. That makes all the difference in the world, and when you apply that fact to everything we're doing in that region, you have to wonder whether we could build a worse reputation there if we tried. We actually have to make an effort to promote justice there rather than simply paying lip service to it, and the strategy of saying "We'll be nice to you when you stop supporting terrorists" is the same thing as saying, "Well be nice to you when you start liking us enough to care about the terrorists operating in your neighborhood." Come on, "The beatings will continue until morale improves" is not a viable strategy.
No, we didn't "deserve" 9/11. It wasn't our "fault." It was the fault of violent extremists who should be brought to justice. What is our fault is that we and our leaders have managed to allow our reputation in the region to become so bad that those violent extremists aren't marginalized. Once that happens, there's no way we can fight them because every one we kill will be replaced by another volunteer. The fact that our leaders simply don't get this still blows my mind. Use force against the terrorists by all means, but unless you've managed to marginalize the terrorists, you're not going to get anywhere. That's where our leadership has failed, and that appears to be where they will continue to fail until enough people have the balls to stand up and point out that maybe the sun doesn't shine out our ass in all corners of the world, and maybe we should spend some time thinking about how our foreign policy reflects that.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Your point is right on the money. For years we have lived in a society where bank tellers give up the cash and do not resist, airline crews sumbit to hijacking and police departments try to negoitiate at all costs - even in the face of armed killers. Well, the bank robbers, hijackers, terrorists and killers who want to be on TV before they go out in a blaze of glory read the news and watch the tube and know how their actions will be responded to. I have seen video footage of anti-bank robbery systems in Europe that drop a steel wall down when a teller fears a robbery. I have been locked out of (or in) computer rooms I need to get into (or out of) - would a strong, locked, bullet resistent door on a plane make more sense than letting ANYONE unauthorized in the cabin? Would the VT killer have taken so many lives if the school had a one hour per semester "how to stay alive" seminar - as the previous writer indicated: If 32 students charged the gunman because they were taught that was the best way to stay alive the number of casulties would have been much lower. If that guy had attacked a room full of people convinced that a rush towards him was the best way to stay alive instead of just sitting there - or at least charging him when he had to reload - the results would have been different. I am not in favor of turning everything into a fortress or everyone into a group of avengers but the old idea that we should wait for someone else is obsolete. The Fergueson shooting case on the Long Island railroad several years ago would have been much like the VT case except that the people on the train attacked before he could reload. The wait for the professionals (esp. in light of Flight 93) mentality is still what the airlines and banks want to push because they are afraid of getting sued. Too F'ING bad. The police don't want people to "take the law into their own hands". Well FCUK that idea too, better to get arrested in order to stay alive than get dead to avoid getting arrested. Even the police have a saying to cover when they use too much force: "Better judged by 12 (jurors) than carried by six (pallbearers).