Edmund Storms wrote:
No one can win against a foe who is willing to die for their belief . . .
True for non-conventional wars. Many Japanese people were willing to
die for their country in 1945 but the U.S. won with conventional
weapons and techniques. (I think the war would have been over soon
even without the atomic bomb.)
and people are only willing to die when they feel very strong about
their belief and see no alternative. The question is, how can the
rest of us respond in a way that is more effective and avoid being
sucked into the black hole of attack and counter attack?
I think the only way to win is to hit them in the pocketbook. We have
to take away their source of funding, which is oil money from Saudi
Arabia and Iran. If cold fusion makes oil worthless, the terror will
dry up in a few years. Heck, plug-in hybrid automobiles could do it.
Despite all the talk about "unconventional" and "asymmetric" war, it
still costs a great deal to run an organization like al-Qaeda, and
the fundamental cause of the war is social disruption triggered by
oceans of cash flowing through and corrupting these societies. If
al-Qaeda did not have hundreds of millions of dollars to throw into
these crazy schools and training camps in places like Pakistan, they
would soon lose their appeal and people would stop sending their
children to be indoctrinated. Muslim families do not do that in
India, the Philippines or anyplace else they can have a life and get
an actual education.
The Saudi government sponsors school for diplomat's kids in Maryland,
that was described in the Washington Post a few years ago. It sounded
to me like a recruiting office for jihad and an effort to turn back
the clock 800 years. That kind of thing can never win and never last,
but as long as they can pay for it, it will cause disruption,
heartache and ruined lives. To the extent they do succeed they hurt
themselves most, and they fast-forward to the day when they will
revert to a camel-based economy facing starvation.
Of course the Saudi people do not have to do this to themselves,
anymore than the flower of Japanese youth "had" to fly kamikaze
airplanes in 1945. The Japanese stopped their blood-mad insanity 61
years ago tomorrow. The Saudis might come to their senses, turn
around beginning today, and embrace modernity, science, rationality
and progress. They might take the lead in cold fusion research and
become the super-power of the 21st century. Never forget that Moslem
society took the place of the Greeks as the leaders in science and
enlightenment, and triggered the European Renaissance. Nothing
inherent to Muslim culture prevents this from happening again. They
are enslaved by history, hate and oil money, not religion.
(Not that religion does any good as far as I can tell. The least
religious modern nations, in Western Europe and Japan, are the most
law abiding, peaceful, wealthy, best educated, with the lowest infant
mortality and so on. I think it would be best if scientific and
technological progress extinguished religion altogether, but perhaps
that is too much to hope for. Anyway religion does little harm as
long as you keep it out of public schools, science classes, the
laboratory and the government.)
There have been fanatical movements in the past devoted to death
cults and self-annihilation. They did not last long because the
self-annihilated. I think the technique is to kill and capture them,
drain the funding, and wait for the fever to pass. The British
approach last week, of treating this as a problem for the anti-terror
police squad, seems right to me. See:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/13/weekinreview/13sanger.html?ref=weekinreview
"Does Calling It Jihad Make It So?"
Quotes:
. . . British officials, on the other hand, referred to the men in
custody as "main players," and declined to discuss either their
motives or ideology so that they would not jeopardize "criminal proceedings."
The difference in these initial public characterizations was
revealing: The American president summoned up language reaffirming
that the United States is locked in a global war in which its enemies
are bound together by a common ideology, and a common hatred of
democracy. For the moment, the British carefully stuck to the
toned-down language of law enforcement.
- Jed
