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John Ried has uncovered a plot to blow 20 odds planes out of the sky with exploding juice bottles .. its not the juice bottles that are the problem<br>Flight 666<br>.. really, how big an imagination do you need to follow the news at the minute ??<br>:biggrin:
Aye – therein lies the problem I suspect GH. One man’s terrorist is anothers martyr or liberating hero. As always there is no black or white.
This is the whole problem with the notion of a war on an abstract noun. Al Qaeda, the Chechens, the IRA, the various groups in Colombia, the Basque Seperatists, they all are classed as terrorists but have little in common besides that. There is little that can be done about terrorism in general, but terrorism in particular can be dealt with. Each group springs from a different cause and for different reasons. Bush and Blair’s hypothesis that all terrorists are basically the same is jumbling up morality with reality. Personally, I have no problem with all the world powers doing whatever it takes to capture or kill any member of Al Quaeda. I don’t see them as arising from a ’cause’ that is in any way worth investigating. Hamas are a different matter entirely. The way to deal permanently with Hamas and Hezbollah would be to establish peace in the Middle East and a viable Palestinian state. But that’s easier said than done.
Indeed Aranalde. I wish I (or anyone come to that) knew the answer. More bullets until it succeeds?
:old:
Mesh hot topic on radio 1 is sex this week<br> I tuned in but fell off my perch<br> wonder why ? :biggrin:
On the terrorism front<br>Arandale’s – <br>I mean Aranalde’s (second edit)<br> piece almost duplicates<br>my views to the millimetre -<br>in fact I was wondering if he<br>was a clone !
Governments don’t wish to define terrorism<br>in case they fit the description one day !
(Edited by gamble at 8:36 am on Aug. 15, 2006)<br>
(Edited by gamble at 8:37 am on Aug. 15, 2006)
IMO, the hatred towards the USA and UK isn’t about their resentment about our wealth, our freedom or our way of life, it’s about the cost the rest of the world is being forced to pay to maintain these things.
Until recently, it’s been quite expedient and cost effective for the west to install dictators around the world which would keep the locals under the thumb while he and we creamed off all the resources.
And, if the locals tried to rise up, we’d clamp down on them by arming the dictator (or just find another dictator for that country).
However, this doesn’t work anymore. Thanks to technology and the ease of international travel/immigaration, these people can, instead of fighting the dictator, take the fight to our civilians.
And, we’re s**t
scared about this.Now, it seems to me that our governments are responding by trying to find new ways of getting these people back under the thumb of "colonial remote control".
Will this work?
Probably not and we’ll probably spend a hell of a lot of money on military misadventures finding out.
(as well as giving up our own freedoms)
Personally, I’d like to think that we could choose a path where our quality of life is no longer based on the suppression of the people of other countries.
In which case, these "organisations" (whether you want to call them terrorists or not) no longer have a sense of injustice to use as a recruiting tool.
(yes, there would still be looney’s signing up to them)
However, I feel we’ve probably done so much damage to the environment that that’s no longer an option and that we’re going to have to take more and more of our resources from other countries just to maintain our standard of living.
In which case, it’s going to end very badly. Very badly indeed.
Steve
the Bullet, you cannot have dialogue with terrorists. terrorists are those who blow up passenger planes, shopping centres, buildings and practise other such indiscriminate murder. happy for the liberals to spend till next eternity discussing whether certain people are martyrs or terrorists but that should not stop the rest of civilised society using the bullets, there are enough bullets to do the job, it’s just a matter of using them properly
OK Simon but do Hamas and Hezbollah qualify for your bullet? ie are they terrorists? Hamas were democratically elected and Hezbollah enjoy majority support in their country.
Well, you might not be too surprised to hear that I think Simon’s got it right re.<br>
happy for the liberals to spend till next eternity discussing whether certain people are martyrs or terrorists but that should not stop the rest of civilised society using the bullets,
<br>Sooner or later a (reasonably) civilised society can surely say with some degree of certainty that a particular body ( take your pick:- IRA/Hezbollah/Plaid Cymru:biggrin: /ETA/Red Brigade/Nazis/Green Party) are baddies. <br>The fact that Hamas was democratically elected (although I don’t know who has the right to vote in Gaza – so I’ll just assume it was democratic) doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t get head-bangers in power. (Hitler’s Germany, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe had elections!) Why some Brits even voted for Ken Livingstone :shocking: Turkeys sometimes do vote for Xmas.<br>Maybe we’ve just got to accept the fact that there will always be conflicts in the world and we’ve just got to make up our mind who wears the black hat and do our best – via the bullet if necessary – to turn them around.
The reason why people search for alternatives to the bullet is not just about being liberal. It is to do with being practical. The lesson about terrorism is that when it is rooted in or has the support of a certain community, then no amount of bullets will be enough, because for every dead terrorist there will be ten willing volunteers to take their place. Right now I am certain that Hezbollah recruitment has never been so good. Because, whether you like it or not, they have the support of a large section of a community. The same would go for the IRA and the Chechen fighters. The only way to deal with these terrorists is to address the aspirations/complaints of the community that is supporting them. Give the Palestinian people a state that is secure, with all occupied territory returned and their capital in East Jerusalem and watch them turn away from Hamas’s aim of destroying Israel, just as the IRA support has dwindled in Northern Ireland since Catholics are no longer discriminated against.
Have heard a lot about the weakness of ‘liberals’. I think the position of those on the right is equally suspect. They tend to simply believe that sounding tough is enough. Decide who the baddies are, call for terrible retribution against them and that’s problem solved, as though international relations was an extension of the Die Hard franchise. Surely the lesson of the last month is that it doesn’t end with the bullet. We just go round and round in circles, creating martyrs and instigating new cycles of revenge. The world and especially the Middle East is a complicated place and it doesn’t cease being complicated just because people like Bush and Blair choose to talk about it like they were starring in a cowboy film. It isn’t weakness to want to investigate why things are as they are, it is essential.
Having said all that, I think you can broadly discern two kinds of terrorist organisation (leaving aside for the moment the question of state terrorism). The first kind are those groups who arise from or successfully attach themselves to a cause, usually portraying themselves as the only protector of a community that feels under attack. The IRA, Hamas, Hezbollah would come into this category. It is impossible to beat these groups through the use of force, since they have the support of a community and every act of violence against them pushes the community and the terrorists closer together. The only way to defeat them is to address the complaints of the community, as already suggested. I do believe there is some mileage in attacking the second kind of terrorist group, that either fails or never tries to attach itself to a particular local cause. I believe Al Quaeda and the various European left-wing terror groups of the 1970s would fall into this category. They are isolated groups of fanatics and I would agree that there is no negotiation with them and, since they are essentially on their own, a military solution is practical.
Unfortunately, the Bush administration has muddled up all the various terrorists together, along with some half-baked neo-con ideas about remaking the Middle East and landed us in the current mess. After 9/11, had he specifically targetted Al Quaeda and only Al Quaeda, there would still be a (more or less) worldwide coalition and the world might actually be a safer place.
Quote from Insomniac – "we’ve just got to make up our mind who wears the black hat and do our best – via the bullet if necessary – to turn them around."
Who’s the ‘we’ then? <br>
The world is rapidly exhausting the Planets ability to provide the natural resources required to sustain unlimited economic growth (capitalist model). This is the root cause of the problem IMO, there just isnt enough to go around and WE in the West want it all.
So called terrorism will get worse because there will be more and more groups of people who want a piece of the pie and there simply isnt enough to start sharing it out.
The reason IRA support "dwindled" is because the bottom fell out of the Irish terrorist market. After years of sponsoring Irish nationalism the US gravy train dried up when the US public realised just where their money went. Irish terrorism both nationalist & unionist was front for crime and some people making a lot of money. They turned to dialogue when the found the bullet was not working.
Indeed I believe money is what the majority of terrorism is about. At the end of the Iraq war there was statistically little anti-coalition action from Iraqis, indeed there was much internal support. The majority of incidents were crime related. Then the money came pouring in with insurgents from Iran etc whose interest were not in a stable Iraq. The poverty stricken local population were bribed with promises of bounties for killing coalition force soldiers. The insurgents, mainly non Iraqis, are slaughtering innocents in an attempt to destabilise the country and start a civil war.
Hezbollah have been armed with an estimated 15,000 Iranian missiles, paid for, and transported through Syria & Lebanon. Someone is making a lot of money out of this. As yet they have no interest in dialogue. Destruction of Israel is their only reason for existence. There is even an outstanding UN resolution calling for them to be disarmed
Fledgling democracies in the Middle East are nothing like what we understand as one man one vote democracies. The population vote en mass on religious and tribal reasons for parties with single issue anti-western/Israeli manifestos. Hamas now have political power and have to run a country. Let’s see if they can do so. I hope they can make the jump to pursuing their aims politically.
Hezbollah had 17% of the Lebanese vote (I think). A country that was beginning to free itself from Syrian/Iranian control and now is dragged back into the nihilistic mire that is Hezbollah’s aims. But that is all Israeli, US & UK’s fault according to many.
The largest "democracy" in the area is clearly Iran. A country that recently elected an extreme leader by any measure and is now bent on a road of Israeli US conflict.
Terrorism is exactly what is the word says. The spreading of terror. Quite frankly the US/UK state terrorism argument is old hat and subjective. Two wrongs do not make a right and there is nothing justifiable about randomly targeting innocent civilians with suicide bombs etc. It is the apologist approach of damming UK/US/Israeli actions and in effect condoning terrorist actions that has a bad taste to many. The real targets of terrorists are not the poor individuals slaughtered. Rather the real targets are you & I. Terrorists use the press to magnify their effect out of all proportion to their real capabilities in the soft underbelly that is western public opinion which gives them the oxygen of publicity they need to survive (and make lots of money). Its easy to sit in you armchair and be an apologist for Hezbollah et al then scream for somebody to protect you when you or your family is directly in the terrorist firing line. Try using some dialogue then. These terrorist groups have no interest in real dialogue and until they do we just have to defend ourselves best we can.
Cant believe I spent time writing this in a Racing Forum
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