The TRUE reason behind terrorism, this is the most brilliant article I ever read!

Parent Cafe
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<p>mini is absolutely correct in post 7. We should listen to what these bombers are saying and believe they mean what they say. But when we do that we should not pick and choose just the parts that conform to OUR ideological preconceptions.</p>

<p>Osama Bin Laden doesn’t just want the United States out of the Middle East, the Jews of Israel driven into the sea, and the corrupt monarchies and dictators of Muslim countries removed from office. That is just the first step towards the restoration of the Caliphate. All the apologize and all the reparations in the world will not turn Dar al-Harb into Dar al-Islam. These people by their own words are waging war on us not for what we have done but for what we haven’t done - convert to Islam and accept a theocratic state.</p>

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<p>Think of the archetype of the solitary assassin: he’s enjoyed little conventional success. He may be marginally employed or unemployed, and close to friendless. He has no chance of achieving legitimate fame; by killing, he’s chosing infamy over anonymity. He has one shot at changing the course of history. He’s not so much trying to hit the politician when he fires his gun: in his perverted mind, his real target is greatness itself.</p>

<p>Some terrorists fit this pattern, with an intervening stage: by joining a conspiracy, they’ve already achieved a sort of importance. Massacres are a big deal; plotting to carry one out is a weighty activity, even before the object of the conspiracy is achieved. The terrorist gets the chance to join a group of people likewise doing something “important.” Kill a hundred people, and you also change the course of history. The belief they are doing so in the interest of striking a blow against a real injustice helps them to sublimate the awful truth that the actual object of their conspiracy is to rip apart the bodies of random strangers, some of them children.</p>

<p>It’s not only terrorists, of course, who kill to achieve their objectives. When Clinton ordered the bombing of wastewater treatment plants in Iraq, he had to have known that his actions would result in the deaths or large numbers of random strangers; he was engaging in asynchronous warfare, American style. </p>

<p>Roosevelt likewise knew what would be the awful consequences of the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden; Truman likewise knew that by dropping Big Boy and Fat Man on populous cities, he would incinerate masses of people. And Bush knew that deposing Saddam Hussein would cost tens of thousand of Iraqi lives.</p>

<p>In the end, what’s the difference between the decision to drop bombs on civilian populations, or the infrastructure on which civilian life depends, and the decision to detonate a bomb in a crowded train car? Is the size of the conspiracy the determining factor? (Presidents don’t make these decisions in a void; they do so with an eye on approval ratings, and on future elections.) Is it the legitimacy of the cause? Is it the likelihood of achieving one’s aims? </p>

<p>If it’s not one of these, is there any difference at all?</p>

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<p>Slightly off topic, but just throught I would add this:</p>

<p>“if you want to understand government intentions, you look at the results first, and then work backwards. The question is not whether you intended to kill the children, but why you chose to.”</p>

<p>Have you noticed how liberals never use this type of rationale when talking about public school teachers unions? If you want to understand the intentions of the teachers unions, look at how appallingly bad minority students are doing. Teachers obviously DESIRE to create a racial gap in test scores and academic achievement because they HATE minority children.</p>

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<p>Mini,</p>

<p>It seems to me that most here are failing to make the essential and fundamental/necessary distinction; that is between</p>

<ol>
<li> The demands of the (unaccountable) individuals/dogs who slaughter (terrorists).</li>
<li> The demands of the populous of countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran (not dogs).</li>
<li> The demands of (accountable) governments like the US, UN, EU countries; that is to say, those which are domesticated.</li>
</ol>

<p>I was opposed to sanctions on Iraq (mainly based on the opinion of my mother, as I was in middle-school at the time). </p>

<p>Keep in mind, my mother is Iranian and lived through the savage attack of Saddam Hossein and his Saudi/US backed army, including the bombing and leveling of cities and villages and the use of chemical weapons. </p>

<p>One such city was the one my mother was living in at the time. Over 5000 people were killed in one day of relentless bombing; my mother has told us stories of body-parts and dead bodies lying all over the streets; she had a bomb explode on a street she was walking across on her way to work as the bombing began, which she barely survived. </p>

<p>Still, most Iranians were still opposed to the sanctions on Iraq as I understand it; even after the slaughter of near a million Iranians in the Iraqi war…the population of Iran was only in the 50+ million range at the time so that was about 1/50 of the total population, however, Iranians still, by and large, considered the Clinton sanctions inhuman. </p>

<p>It is, therefore, interesting to me to see the righteous indignation toward the current Republican administration’s policies (which I opposed) by some posting in this forum in light of their silence on the documented horrors of US sanctions policy towards Iraq during the “humane” Clinton decade: Using C. Powell’s phrase, we’ve finally bought it, rather than simply repeatedly breaking it and acting like it is not broken, or someone else did it for a self-righteous decade.</p>

<p>As to the Tamil tigers use of suicide bombers, I believe that was a civil war, much like the Palestinian/Israeli civil war, not a war without borders, or end, like that waged by the dogs of Al Qaeeda. </p>

<p>Moreover, if history is the issue, I would have gone much further back than the Tamils, to Hassan Saba and the Isma’ili Assassins of Alamut (a mountain fortress in 11th cent Iran—destroyed in the war). However, these ‘pedar-sag’ (son’s of dogs) are not really comparable to the Tamils or the Palestinians, much less the followers of Hassan Saba. They are petty criminals and social dogs (Greybeard’s description was, of course, right on).</p>

<p>And that is the point; to equate the demands of these dogs with the political demands of the Muslims and Arabs of the Middle East (or even the techniques of these dogs with those of the Tamil or Palestinian ‘fighters’/suicide bombers) is a horrible, even criminal, misreading of the political/social conditions in the Middle East.</p>

<p>It is better to compare the demands of these psycho-paths with other psycho-paths and treat them accordingly…say, Timothy McVeigh, or Om Shinrikyo.</p>

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<p>By the way, the word “assassin” has its etymological origin in the word Hashish (that’s right, the one you smoke). The Nazari Isma’ilis of Hasan Sabah used hashish as a drug to simulate the ecstasy and peace of paradise in preparing for their stealthy ‘diplomatic’ missions of death. The word, ‘Hashashin’ (hash) was corrupted into ‘assassin’ by later western commentators, thus the hashishin became the assassins or, users of hashish became the committers of assassination, striking terror into all of their opponents.</p>

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<p>We have two peace loving groups–The Christians, and the Muslims. They are fighting the same war for 1300 years. It never ends. It sometimes subsides. Then right back to the fighting. I wonder if someday it will be the Christians, the Muslims and the Atheists (The Chinese) fighting each other. </p>

<p>Human nature…hasn’t changed yet.</p>

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<p>I think your take on the religious nature of the conflict is far too simplistic (and cynically anti-religion) in claiming it is Christians versus Muslims. I think a better description is radical Muslims against non-radical Muslims (of all religious stripes). The bombings in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Indonesia, Iraq and Europe (which is far more secularist than it is “Christian”) are indicative of the fact that the radical Islamicists don’t care who they attack if their targets do not share their view of Islam.</p>

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<p>Hell just froze.</p>

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<p>“so that was about 1/50 of the total population, however, Iranians still, by and large, considered the Clinton sanctions inhuman.”</p>

<p>And that’s what so interesting…the Iranians, with so many killed by Saddam Hussein in war, considered the Clinton murder of 500,000 children (a million people total, but virtually none of them soldiers) inhuman, but the Americans, who never faced any direct attack from Saddam Hussein whatsoever, did not, not even when informed about it by war criminal, excuse me, Secretary of State, Albright on national TV. Is it the “Christian” character of the American nation that finds genocide acceptable to advance foreign policy goals, or was it that the terrorist Clinton government was “unaccountable”, or is it, if the killing is “clean” (that is distant, and indirect), it is a useful and acceptable instrument of American foreign policy? I don’t mean the questions above to be rhetorical, because I have been asked them repeatedly by friends abroad, and I have never been able to provide a suitable answer.</p>

<p>Add up all the killings of innocents by Saddam Hussein over 25 years (adults and children), add in Kuwaiti casualties, add in all the terrorist casualties over the past 10 years, and it still isn’t close to the number of Clinton-linked child deaths that took place over a three-year period. </p>

<p>Let me be clear: I don’t excuse ANYONE for murder, and certainly not of innocents. But when ascribing motives, it is useful, even essential, to understand how others see us. Iraqi army untrained? doesn’t fight well? ask how many of them had brothers, sisters, or children killed by the Americans a decade back, slow, torturous, easily preventable deaths. Is the problem that they see themselves having to fight for the Americans rather than for their own country? I don’t know the answer, but I do know enough to ask the question.</p>

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<p>

Sorry to rain on your parade but President Clinton did not kill half a million children. Where’s TheDad when you need him?</p>

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<p>“Hell just froze.”</p>

<p>This will be fantastic news—if true—for millions of unrepentant sinners;)</p>

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<p>Didn’t you read Mini’s post, razorsharp? Of course Clinton didn’t personally murder half a million children. The death of those children not to mention countless innocent adults) resulted directly from the disease and famine brought on by U.S. bombings and sanctions. I hope (perhaps naively) that these devastating consequenses were not intentional, but my more cynical core suspects that neither the Clinton nor Bush (both I and II) administrations were greatly troubled by the collateral damage. The American public, too, readily accepted the propaganda that was used to justify such policies, and often was not even aware of the human devastation that resulted from these policies. We were far too mesmerized/titilated by tabloid trash like the O.J. Simpson trial. </p>

<p>Hell just froze over, huh, TheDad?----What—you and FundingFather finally agree on something? LOL…!</p>

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<p>FS, not necessarily if you buy into Dante’s version of the frozen circle, for instance.</p>

<p>PH, I wouldn’t get too excited. It (the transient agreement) would probably fall apart at either the expansions phase or the footnote phase. In fact, I’m virtually certain of it.</p>

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<p>TheDad,</p>

<p>but then your analogy would fall apart;)</p>

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<p>“Didn’t you read Mini’s post, razorsharp? Of course Clinton didn’t personally murder half a million children”</p>

<p>Clinton no more murdered half a million children in Iraq than Osama Bin Laden drove planes into the Twin Towers. </p>

<p>Let’s be clear, too. They didn’t die because of the sanctions per se, but because of the U.S. bombing of the wastewater treatment plants and water purification facilities. The sanctions simply made it impossible to treat the resulting diseases. It’s rather like the 3,000 people who died when the planes hit the Twin Towers. Most of the people didn’t die because the planes hit the Twin Towers, but because the Twin Towers fell down. And, like the planes at the Twin Towers, the actions were aimed at civilians rather than military targets. </p>

<p>The analogy, though, really isn’t a good one. The horrific deaths of the 3,000 people at the Twin Towers pales in comparison to an intended genocide that killed one-twentieth of the population, and about one-fifth of the children.</p>

<p>Anyway, the point isn’t who was worse - in fact, that’s irrelevant. But if you want to understand why the Iraqis don’t want to fight for the Americans, you don’t have far to look. As long as the Iraq “security forces” think they are essentially “American” security forces, they are not likely to be particularly effective - folks simply join up for a paycheck. Yet another reason why the U.S. should leave Iraq immediately, for the sake of the long-term stability of the country.</p>

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<p>We can’t leave. Haliburton, Lockheed, and GE haven’t made enough money.</p>

<p>Who really runs this country? </p>

<p><a href=“http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/providerarticle.asp?feed=OBR&Date=20050723&ID=4986325[/url]”>http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/providerarticle.asp?feed=OBR&Date=20050723&ID=4986325&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>

Yes, I read it. And then he restated such nonsense:

The reason we may not win the war on terror is because we have so many spinless Blame America First types among our citizens. Many of President Clinton’s actions in dealing with Iraq were logical and appropriate. If there is a critism that is justified it was that he was too weak to follow through with his numerous appropriate threats. How about we start with where the blame truly resided – the former leader of Iraq.</p>

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<p>Yes. Logical and appropriate. Killing half a million children usually is. As the anti-Saddam interviewee noted above, first look at the result (killing the kids, rather than, say, bombing military installations, or army barracks, or Saddam’s headquarters or some such), and then work backwards to the (logical and appropriate) reasons. But you’re missing the point, which was not to bash Clinton/Albright for genocide (which they richly deserve) but to try to understand why the so-called Iraqi “security” forces only fight halfheartedly on what they perceive to be the U.S.’ behalf.</p>

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<p>My question is this (and I really don’t know the answer): are certain actions that lead to death in hopes of greater gain ever justifiable.</p>

<p>Let’s step away from Iraq for a moment and consider Hitler’s slaughter of millions of innocent people. Granted, the rest of the world was remarkably slow to take action to stop Hitler. But, when the world did act, there was obviously “collateral damage” in terms of innocent people being killed, having their homes and livelihood lost, etc. So, should the rest of the world never have intervened to stop Hitler because there would be collateral damage in the process?</p>

<p>Some might say Iraq and Saddam Hussein fall under the same pattern: It is a proven fact that he was slaughtering his own citizens. The U.S. stepped in (granted, also late and in some cases ineptly). There was collateral damage. Does stopping Saddam justify that collateral damage or should we just have sat back and continued to do nothing? </p>

<p>So, the question: is it better to NEVER act because of potential collateral damage or to ACT in an effort to stop an underlying lunacy? What does everyone think (and I’m asking for your thoughts on this question, not necessarily a discussion of whether the US actions were/are right/wrong).</p>

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<p>

Carolyn, that small part of your question could have been turned into a motto for the D-Day army troops and the USMC in the Pacific during WWII. They said “yes,” God bless them all.</p>