Understanding terrorism

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

removing the threat presented us by bigots and religious fanatics --

That is not what we are doing in Iraq. Hussein was a tinpot dictator, but he was a secular one. He tortured people for purely personal and/or political reasons. The bigots and religious fanatics are the ones who are now preparing to write sharia law into the Iraqi Constitution.

Nondemocratic social orders are prone to wars, wars by proxy (terrorist movements, deniable with varying plausibility by the ruling circles) and extremism.

Why, that's what the US has been doing for decades! Good point. We do need to work on improving our democracy.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

That is not what we are doing in Iraq. Hussein was a tinpot dictator, but he was a secular one. He tortured people for purely personal and/or political reasons. . .

I don't think you're looking into it deeply enough, Happy. To make Islamoterrorism go extinct, you need to eliminate all of its breeding grounds, which means all of the non-democracies in the Arabic-speaking world, and then further, in all the Islamic world. A large task, true, but not necessarily impossible, except to the mind that finds freedom too great a strain. Iraq was one such breeding ground, and the case of al-Zarqawi getting surgery from Saddam's Iraq, connected to al-Qaeda quite closely enough for me. And what country was it that harbored Carlos the Jackal, before snuffing him just before the 2003 invasion in case he inconvenienced somebody like Saddam by talking? Saddam's Iraq was in it up to their collective neck, people, and from first principles, not because we shot at them. We'd not have shot at them if they hadn't been in it already.

To amplify: there's no particular wrong in taking the weakest dictatorship down first, and it's already been shown ad nauseam that if our Middle East policy were solely about oil, such a policy would have been singularly ill served by our giving the Rumaila oilfield right back to Iraq just as soon as we could walk our boots and roll our tanks off it.

We want these nations to stop behaving like shitheads, and since we don't particularly wish to exterminate all their inhabitants, democratization sounds like the best bet. Will these democracies precisely resemble the US? Don't bet on it; these will always have an Arab accent to them, or their populaces will choke on them -- and go back to some shitheaded manner of society. I'd call that unacceptable, wouldn't you?

Why, that's what the US has been doing for decades! Good point. We do need to work on improving our democracy.

Monkey, that's a damned dishonest spin to put on our effort to fight against tyrannies. Just because we temporarily fail to fight against one tyrant does not make illegitimate removing and hanging another, and you know that perfectly well. I mean, how could it? The above example of leftist-think is a good example of just why I am no sort of leftist: their thoughts are stupid, and they do not satisfy. Also, I'm too old, and have grown up too far, to be a leftist, or be taken in by their cant, or their can'ts.

Level with me, can't you? Isn't this less because its being done at all than it is because it's a Republican doing it? The Democrats haven't presented a President capable of getting this done since Johnson, and he blew it. The record of the last two generations shows the Republicans, on getting this kind of chance, don't blow it. Who's got the winning record here?

I posit myself as a fairly neutral observer of this partisan wrassle, being of the Libertarian persuasion.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

I don't think you're looking into it deeply enough, Happy. To make Islamoterrorism go extinct, you need to eliminate all of its breeding grounds, which means all of the non-democracies in the Arabic-speaking world, and then further, in all the Islamic world.

Actually, the terrorist breeding-grounds are every country in the world. Pre-war Iraq wasn't much (if at all) worse than average in that regard, and it was lower than pretty much all of its neighbors.

Monkey, that's a damned dishonest spin to put on our effort to fight against tyrannies. Just because we temporarily fail to fight against one tyrant does not make illegitimate removing and hanging another, and you know that perfectly well.

Did I say anything about temporarily failing to fight? The US has actively supported tyrannies and terrorist organization both publically and behind the scenes for decades.

Level with me, can't you? Isn't this less because its being done at all than it is because it's a Republican doing it?

No.

The Democrats haven't presented a President capable of getting this done since Johnson, and he blew it. The record of the last two generations shows the Republicans, on getting this kind of chance, don't blow it. Who's got the winning record here?

Clinton, I guess, by your definition. Bush I left Saddam in power, and the current Bush is putting the Sharia Law people in power in Iraq and Afghanistan. The war Clinton was involved in was successful, had no US casualties, and didn't trash the country involved.