Paul,
Figured I'd just jump in somewhere. I haven't been around for a while and what the heck, leap in where there's controversy. I mean...why not?
Although I may have misread them, I'm inclined to echo your thoughts in the post I'm responding to. The logic, to me, goes something like this.
If you go to a doctor because you feel terrible, it makes sense that the doctor know what is actually wrong with you before he prescribes a course of treatment. The same logic seems applicable to international relations as well as regarding terrorists. Might not be such a bad idea to find out what they're actually bent about before we are so cock-sure we have "the" cure.
And, if we got all the terrorists on the planet on one island and nuked them to kingdom come...A. We have not eliminated terrorism because terrorism is just a symptom of underlying motive causes, not the causes themselves. They're doing it for some reason and the reason is not that they're all "crazy". B. Unless we get all their kids, friends and relatives on the island too...we likely would simply create the next generation of terrorists because now they're not only going to be bent about whatever it was their parents, friends and relatives were bent about in the first place, but NOW we've added personal revenge to the mix.
As I said, I may have misread your take on the issue but, as I see it, getting rid of terrorists does not eliminate terrorism, getting rid of the causes of terrorism eliminates terrorism.
John Kerry was attacked for saying "we need to reduce terrorism to a tolerable level". His opponents charged him with "thinking terrorism was tolerable". It's a little depressing to me to think that many people never realized Kerry was being accused of saying something he never said.
We cannot ever completely eliminate terrorism, there's just no way to zero it out. So what other choice IS there but to reduce it to some "tolerable level"? Certainly the argument that NO terrorism is ever "tolerable" is valid but since we can't have it, why waste time on something we'll never get? Somewhere between "none" and "all the time" is the only choice we have. So how does one determine that level? And...how on earth could a politician offer such a figure?
The fact that Kerry ever said that makes him either a very brave realist or an incredibly foolish presidential candidate. And practically speaking of course, it's a little of both.
Isaac Newton said that even if he'd proven gravity existed, he had no idea what it actually was and he'd leave that to the future to figure out. Similarly, although I am comfortable with my logic, I do not have any concrete answer to the current problem. My sense tells me however that the tack we're taking is not working...in Iraq, or in Afghanistan, or in Iran or in N. Korea. I'm trying to imagine what level of "scary" response on our part might do the trick?
There is certainly some logic to the idea that we may scare future terrorists away from trying something. But that doesn't seem to be working at the moment and if we scare some of them, we'll never scare off the truly dedicated martyrs. So isn't that "reducing terrorism to an acceptable level"?
Tad
