Let's try this idea. Ask the terrorists want they want and then give it to them.
1) At the time of 9/11, Ben Laden wanted two things--- the US out of Saudi because our presence defiled the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and an end to the Israeli-Arab war. In subsequent events, the Saudis kicked us out of their country and we have continually fumbled resolving the Israeli-Palestinian war, in addition to the Afghanistan mess and the Iraq mess. No wonder Ben Laden plans to attack us again.
2) The latest demand isn't too much higher than his first demands. Ben Laden wants all of the US out of all of the Islamic nations. In other words, he wants "Yankee go home." which we have done before right after Viet Nam and which we were in the process of doing in Europe, the Philippines, and other locations since the end of the cold war.
By just giving him what he wants, he does not attack us, dispensing with the need to higher millions of security guards to check citizen ID cards at road intersections (Visions of "your papers, Please!! as uttered by a trench-coated Nazi in old WW2 movies). We don't have to get undressed to board airplanes (which happened to me at Corpus Christi recently--the TSA guard made me take my pants off in public). We avoid the need to kick off a second American Revolution to regain our constitutional rights which this administration seems to want to take away from us in the name of the war on terror.
By giving Ben Laden what he wants, we secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves:
a. We stop pouring $2 billion per month in the Iraq rat hole and do not need to continually borrow it from the Chinese, putting our future generations in hock to China.
b. We have our troops home again where they won't be killed by having their helicopters shot down, getting IED'ed, or headshot by Juba the Bagdad sniper.
c. Because we won't get any Arab oil any more, we kick the oil addiction once and for all - and when we can do it, the rest of the world will do it, thereby cutting off financing for the Islamic oil producers and helping them reach their goal which is....
d. The Islamic world can go back to the 14th century which is where Ben Laden came from - any we don't have to care one bit about it. They don't want our culture, our music, or our ideas on democratic government. They want it like it always was before us, which was the 14th century.
e. There won't be any terrorists attacks on the west because the terror leaders will naturally turn against each other and fight it out with each other---something they did before and which they will do again. There is nothing more fragile than an empire under the control of one man when everybody else has an AK-47, suicide bombers, good IEDs and a willingness to use them on their fellow man.
You really do not need a science fiction writer to make the point. They just have to read a bit if history to know that the American empire is fated to go the way of all other
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Let's try this idea. Ask the terrorists want they want and then give it to them. 1) At the time of 9/11, Ben Laden wanted two things--- the US out of Saudi because our presence defiled the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and an end to the Israeli-Arab war. In subsequent events, the Saudis kicked us out of their country and we have continually fumbled resolving the Israeli-Palestinian war, in addition to the Afghanistan mess and the Iraq mess. No wonder Ben Laden plans to attack us again. 2) The latest demand isn't too much higher than his first demands. Ben Laden wants all of the US out of all of the Islamic nations. In other words, he wants "Yankee go home." which we have done before right after Viet Nam and which we were in the process of doing in Europe, the Philippines, and other locations since the end of the cold war. By just giving him what he wants, he does not attack us, dispensing with the need to higher millions of security guards to check citizen ID cards at road intersections (Visions of "your papers, Please!! as uttered by a trench-coated Nazi in old WW2 movies). We don't have to get undressed to board airplanes (which happened to me at Corpus Christi recently--the TSA guard made me take my pants off in public). We avoid the need to kick off a second American Revolution to regain our constitutional rights which this administration seems to want to take away from us in the name of the war on terror. By giving Ben Laden what he wants, we secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves: a. We stop pouring $2 billion per month in the Iraq rat hole and do not need to continually borrow it from the Chinese, putting our future generations in hock to China. b. We have our troops home again where they won't be killed by having their helicopters shot down, getting IED'ed, or headshot by Juba the Bagdad sniper. c. Because we won't get any Arab oil any more, we kick the oil addiction once and for all - and when we can do it, the rest of the world will do it, thereby cutting off financing for the Islamic oil producers and helping them reach their goal which is ....
d. The Islamic world can go back to the 14th century which is where Ben Laden came from - any we don't have to care one bit about it. They don't want our culture, our music, or our ideas on democratic government. They want it like it always was before us, which was the 14th century.
e. There won't be any terrorists attacks on the west because the terror leaders will naturally turn against each other and fight it out with each other---something they did before and which they will do again. There is nothing more fragile than an empire under the control of one man when everybody else has an AK-47, suicide bombers, good IEDs and a willingness to use them on their fellow man.
You really do not need a science fiction writer to make the point. They just have to read a bit if history to know that the American empire is fated to go the way of all other