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  • From: Thomas Beckett <thomas AT tbeckett.com>
  • To: InterNetWorkers <internetworkers AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: collapse
  • Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2001 00:55:29 -0400


Robert Weeks wrote:
> Historically no. Japan certainly stopped sending kamikazes over to attack
> us.

When they ran out of airplanes. (At least they had the decency to use
their own aircraft, eh?)

> What would you have done about Hitler? Look for a non-violent solution?

Hitler was created by the situation the Allied Powers left behind
after
World War I. Hitler could have been prevented. The Marshall Plan
prevented another Hitler, Mussolini, and/or Tojo, no doubt. (Godwin
unsuccessful, sorry. I've been thinking about the economics of this all
day.)

> If countries are afraid to harbor known terrorists and their training camps
> I think we will see a great reduction in terrorist aggressions. I think a
> lot of other people agree with me on this.

Yeah, Saddam Hussein is shaking in his boots.

> Of course we could just go on doing what we've been doing for the last 25
> years, maybe one day it will be your friends and family that are affected,
> bombed, or gassed or the economy of this country ruined to the point where
> we become a third world country and then maybe you'll see things a little
> differently.

Or maybe we could change our policy towards the Middle East and foster
economic development rather than more conflict there. We have it in our
power. Cheaper than a war, too, I'm sure.

> Freedom fighters, pluheeze spare me. Did these cowards even take credit for
> their actions or tell us what the hell they killed thousands of innocent
> Americans for?

The people they were fighting for knew. That is all that mattered.

B wrote:
> As with anything, this type of atrocity requires motivation and means.
> There's not much we can do about the motivation, as we do *not*
> understand these people, their culture, their belief system, or their
> situation.

Listen, to understand any situation like this, you have to look at it
from the other guy's point of view. They are not so alien as you might
think. There are a lot of gun-toting fundamentalists living right here
among us (only they call themselves Christian) who differ mainly in that
their standard of living is higher.

In looking at these terrorists and the people they believe they
represent, we have group that is united by an ethnic and religious
identity rather than any national affiliation. And united by the fact
that they've been shit upon by the Western world for the better part of
a century.

They primarily identify with other downtrodden Arabs, who can be found
in abundance lately.

This mainly means the Palestinian Arabs, who have been forced into an
increasingly restrictive apartheid system in Israel for decades now.
And frankly, many Arabs don't see any difference between the U.S. and
Israel. Either Israel is our direct proxy, or we are propping up and
protecting the Israeli state for our own purposes. And they're pretty
much right: any time the U.S. has really wanted Israel to do something,
they have done it. If we wanted Israel to stop further land grabs on
the small amount of territory left to the Palestinians (the
"settlements") they would. There are more Palestinians living outside of
occupied Palestine and Israel now than inside those borders. And they
want their homeland back.

Add to this the human toll of continued sanctions against Iraq, cruise
missile attacks against "not-worthwhile" targets in Afghanistan and an
admittedly non-terrorist pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, and you've got

a sizeable group of people who are really pissed off at us.

Also: they are for frequently very poor. Sure, there are wealthy
regimes in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, but a lot of Arabs in that part of
the world have very hard lives. There's economic and cultural
resentment at work, too. There's something in common with the
anti-globalization protestors in Seattle, D.C., and Genoa.
American-style capitalism is invading their homeland and attacking their
traditional culture. Where do you look to strike back at that?

In a number of these countries, Palestine and Afghanistan in
particular, life is very violent. Young men die every day. Kind of
like the situation of young black men in desperately poor urban
communities in this country: why not sell join the gangs? at least
there is some sense of affiliation. There just isn't a lot of prospect
for a better life, so its not hard to find folks willing to die to make
life better for their fellow Arabs.

Throw some religious fundamentalism into the mix, which has a very
potent message to such people, and you've got a lot of foment looking
for an outlet.

Leaders like Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein play to this situation quite
well, setting themselves up as heroes for opposing the West and the U.S.
in particular. And succeeding!

And look at us here in the U.S., with our high standards of living,
our
low standards of morality, and our unrelenting drive to recreate their
world in our image. The U.S., the world's only superpower, that uses its
might to starve and kill innocent civilians and to prop up Israeli
apartheid. We defeated the Soviet Union, we defeated Saddam's
1,000,000-strong army. They can't fight against us in a conventional
war, they'd have no chance. But they can fight against us.

So when I look at Tuesday's disasters from the other guy's point of
view, I can't help but see a lot of "now you know how it feels" in those
horrific acts. "Now you can't ignore us."

> Along with cash, the "means" column primarily consists of
> infrastructure. Take out their warehouses, their practice parks, their
> manufacturing centers, and you've given them some major obstacles to
> fomenting terror. Make sure that raw materials stay out of their hands.

So shall we start with the flight schools in Florida? Order
airstrikes
against box-cutting knife manufacturers in Peoria? Their "means" has
mostly come from the U.S. The only state definitely known to have been
"harboring" these terrorists has been Florida. The 1993 WTC bomb was
primarily agricultural fertilizer, just like McVeigh used. Let's
carpet-bomb Monsanto, shall we?

You take it back to the Middle East, you have the same problem. There
are substantial numbers of god-fearing, honest people living throughout
the Arab world who want simply to make a living and better their lives
just like the rest of us. They may be critical of the U.S., but they
want no part of terrorists. And they own the warehouses, the fertilizer
factories, the box-cutter factories, the pharmaceutical plants and the
corner stores which may also be patronized by terrorists. In a war, it
is really hard to pick and choose your victims.

> If our government does indeed decide to attack the apparent perps, I
> feel sure that it will do everything in its power to shield the
> innocent. We're like that.

We are, but we're not very good at it. And frankly, when you kill a
civilian, you create a terrorist. We've lost a lot of civilians. It is
indescribably painful. Let us choose not become terrorists.

> However, if bombing the bastards back beyond
> the stone age just before building a 1,000-foot wall without gates
> around the entire country is what it takes to stop this crap, I'm for
> it.

The point is, there's not an "entire country" to bomb. It is a
minority of people spread across a bunch of countries. You bomb them,
you create more of them out of otherwise decent people.

The point is, you have to understand the "enemy" in order to succeed
in
the struggle.

So I say: bring these terrorists to justice, but don't make war.
Spend your war money on economic development in that part of the world,
deal with the decent people there to make their lives better, and the
evil people will lose their potency.


There's a saying among lawyers: If you go to court, you've already
lost. It is even more true of war. Making war will not solve this
problem.

TaB




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