The War on Terror

[Kaine for Senate '18]

What should our strategy be in conducting the War on Terror?  Should we try and wage unilateral, random attacks against states suspected of hosting terrorists; should we try and implement regime changes in countries that are suspected of supporting terrorism; should we find where the terrorists are, and just bomb them out, or should we do something else?

[Ban my account ffs!]

Support the true enemy of extremist Islamic terrorism:  Education.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     Act like Switzerland.

[Јas]

Well first things first, you'll have to define your enemy before you can devise a strategy to win.
What is a 'War on Terror' anyway?

[dead0man]

Take the people being paid to fight the War on Drugs and give them new job descriptions.

[Bunwahaha [still dunno why, but well, so be it]]

Support the true enemy of extremist Islamic terrorism:  Education.

In this sense, I think that before supporting education, if you want results, first you will have to fight two big allies of extremist Islamic terrorism which are: Wretchedness and Despair.

And if you look at the 9/11 terrorists for example you can add other big allies of this terrorism which are: Humiliation and Lost of the psychological marks.

Yes, these terrorists were part of the upper-middle class of their respective countries, they were educated, had enough money to live with dignity and had hope in their future studies. And that's when they started to live in Western countries,  for their studies, that they felt psychologically lost and humiliated in their culture and that they began to join Salafist preachers.

So, lot of things to fight if you really want to fight against this terrorism...

[Franzl]

What should our strategy be in conducting the War on Terror?  Should we try and wage unilateral, random attacks against states suspected of hosting terrorists; should we try and implement regime changes in countries that are suspected of supporting terrorism; should we find where the terrorists are, and just bomb them out, or should we do something else?

sounds pretty much like Dubya's foreign policy.

[JSojourner]

What should our strategy be in conducting the War on Terror?  Should we try and wage unilateral, random attacks against states suspected of hosting terrorists; should we try and implement regime changes in countries that are suspected of supporting terrorism; should we find where the terrorists are, and just bomb them out, or should we do something else?

sounds pretty much like Dubya's foreign policy.

The Bush Doctrine:  "If attacked by China, invade Italy."

[Franzl]

What should our strategy be in conducting the War on Terror?  Should we try and wage unilateral, random attacks against states suspected of hosting terrorists; should we try and implement regime changes in countries that are suspected of supporting terrorism; should we find where the terrorists are, and just bomb them out, or should we do something else?

sounds pretty much like Dubya's foreign policy.

The Bush Doctrine:  "If attacked by China, invade Italy."

well....yes

But the part about invading sovereign nations "suspected" of harboring terrorists is definitely part of the Bush doctrine

[Хahar 🤔]

"Terror" is a red herring. People don't want "freedom", they want jobs.

[Franzl]

"Terror" is a red herring. People don't want "freedom", they want jobs.

If only it were that simple...

[Хahar 🤔]

"Terror" is a red herring. People don't want "freedom", they want jobs.

If only it were that simple...

Give them education and jobs and they'll be fine. It's just that we've never tried that.

[Kaine for Senate '18]

What should our strategy be in conducting the War on Terror?  Should we try and wage unilateral, random attacks against states suspected of hosting terrorists; should we try and implement regime changes in countries that are suspected of supporting terrorism; should we find where the terrorists are, and just bomb them out, or should we do something else?

sounds pretty much like Dubya's foreign policy.

Well, then, that is clearly not the strategy to follow.

[Franzl]

"Terror" is a red herring. People don't want "freedom", they want jobs.

If only it were that simple...

Give them education and jobs and they'll be fine. It's just that we've never tried that.

you think most terrorist attacks have been carried out by poor, uneducated people without jobs?

[Sbane]

"Terror" is a red herring. People don't want "freedom", they want jobs.

If only it were that simple...

Give them education and jobs and they'll be fine. It's just that we've never tried that.

you think most terrorist attacks have been carried out by poor, uneducated people without jobs?

Radical islam exists because of poor,uneducated people. Religion is all they have. Al qaeda is a special case imo. Most terrorists are poor are uneducated be it Egypt,Gaza,Palestine,Kashmir or Afghanistan. For example how many malaysian terrorists are there? That country is majority muslim.

[Franzl]

"Terror" is a red herring. People don't want "freedom", they want jobs.

If only it were that simple...

Give them education and jobs and they'll be fine. It's just that we've never tried that.

you think most terrorist attacks have been carried out by poor, uneducated people without jobs?

Radical islam exists because of poor,uneducated people. Religion is all they have. Al qaeda is a special case imo. Most terrorists are poor are uneducated be it Egypt,Gaza,Palestine,Kashmir or Afghanistan. For example how many malaysian terrorists are there? That country is majority muslim.

I guess I was talking about Al Qaeda mostly. In many cases, I'm sure you're right.

[Хahar 🤔]

The root of extremism is, after all, discontent.

[phk]

"Terror" is a red herring. People don't want "freedom", they want jobs.

If only it were that simple...

Give them education and jobs and they'll be fine. It's just that we've never tried that.

you think most terrorist attacks have been carried out by poor, uneducated people without jobs?

Radical islam exists because of poor,uneducated people. Religion is all they have. Al qaeda is a special case imo. Most terrorists are poor are uneducated be it Egypt,Gaza,Palestine,Kashmir or Afghanistan. For example how many malaysian terrorists are there? That country is majority muslim.

This pent-up fury has very little to do with the Iraq war but is rather driven by the sense of impotence in facing a rapidly changing and developing world while the Middle East is caught in a time warp. Thus, the shortcut to glory is to resurrect a romanticized vision of an Islamic Empire. To understand why the Iraq war did not start or enable this movement, one should look at one of its most ambitious goals: conquering Rome.

There is a revelation attributed to the Prophet Muhammad that both Byzantium's Constantinople and Italy's Rome would be occupied by victorious Muslim armies. Indeed, such armies managed to turn the seat of the Orthodox Christian faith at Constantinople's St. Sophia into a mosque some 600 years ago, and now the jihadists have plans to add a minaret to St. Peter's, thus forever changing the Vatican skyline. This is what we are dealing with, and it should be taken seriously.

America is the only nation that would have the wherewithal to do something about this impending danger but its political class is too absorbed in vengeful partisan blood-lust for what is perceived to be a failure of policy in Iraq.

[Associate Justice PiT]

"Terror" is a red herring. People don't want "freedom", they want jobs.

If only it were that simple...

Give them education and jobs and they'll be fine. It's just that we've never tried that.

you think most terrorist attacks have been carried out by poor, uneducated people without jobs?

Radical islam exists because of poor,uneducated people. Religion is all they have. Al qaeda is a special case imo. Most terrorists are poor are uneducated be it Egypt,Gaza,Palestine,Kashmir or Afghanistan. For example how many malaysian terrorists are there? That country is majority muslim.

None of the 9/11 hijackers were poor and only 1 was devoutly religious at that.

     He excluded Al Qaeda from his analysis.

[phk]

"Terror" is a red herring. People don't want "freedom", they want jobs.

If only it were that simple...

Give them education and jobs and they'll be fine. It's just that we've never tried that.

you think most terrorist attacks have been carried out by poor, uneducated people without jobs?

Radical islam exists because of poor,uneducated people. Religion is all they have. Al qaeda is a special case imo. Most terrorists are poor are uneducated be it Egypt,Gaza,Palestine,Kashmir or Afghanistan. For example how many malaysian terrorists are there? That country is majority muslim.

None of the 9/11 hijackers were poor and only 1 was devoutly religious at that.

     He excluded Al Qaeda from his analysis.

He should exclude more than just that. I'v heard of stories where doctor's children (budding upper class) join local Islamist groups in Pakistan. While poor Muslims in Mali think OBL is deranged. Its more than just economics.

Though one notable thing I'd mention is that if Al-Qaeda is removed from the picture than so is the War on Terror. Most terrorist groups in the  Muslim world focus on local issues that the US could have conveniently ignored pre-9/11.

[Ban my account ffs!]

Take the people being paid to fight the War on Drugs and give them new job descriptions.

I so agree.  If they can't fight emotion altering substances, then maybe they'll be better fighting an actual emotion.

[JohnFKennedy]

This pent-up fury has very little to do with the Iraq war but is rather driven by the sense of impotence in facing a rapidly changing and developing world while the Middle East is caught in a time warp. Thus, the shortcut to glory is to resurrect a romanticized vision of an Islamic Empire. To understand why the Iraq war did not start or enable this movement, one should look at one of its most ambitious goals: conquering Rome.

I don't think that is entirely true. Firstly, Islamism is not simply restricted to the Middle East - which I wouldn't say was exactly caught in a 'time warp' anyway - but can be found in Africa, Southeast Asia and also within countries like the United States and the United Kingdom.

Further to that, I'd be curious as to what you mean by 'impotence'. As I see it, the recent surge in Islamism can be put down to a pecular interaction between globalization, modernity, and Islam. The 1970s and 1980s saw a kind of Islamic euphoria generated by events such as the Iranian Revolution, the struggle against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and the gains of Islamist parties in national parliamentary elections such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Further to that you had urbanization, the expansion of educational institutions and opportunities and the emergence and spread of new forms of communication and representation. What this created was a sort of new Muslim public facilitating the rise of Islamic intellectuals outside the religious establishment. In other words; you have a resurgent and strong Islam emerging in the 1970s and 1980s, which also becomes a powerful force for protest - for instance against the Shah in Iran.

Now, by the 1990s this was all changing with a notable decline for these forces, for instance in the 1992 overturning of the FIS' election victory in Algeria by the military. Equally, the cultural shifts I've already mentioned were beginning to have a destablizing effect with a widespread crisis of the social authority of the faith. In other words, what you end up with is a conflict over the meaning and representation of Islam; as claims to its status as a coherent body of beliefs or a unified body of believers become increasily difficult, extremism seeks to steal the stage. The problem first became most evident on the frontiers of the Islamic world, for instance in Afghanistan, Checnya and Bosnia, and has gradually expanded into targetting the West which poses a clear threat to Islamic integrity as what are perceived as traditional western values are incorporated into Islamic notions of modernity. In other words, these national Islamist projects externalize their internal limitations and contradictions onto a Western 'Other'.

Further to that, I think you see a similar trend starting later in Indonesia where religious violence has become a particular fact of life in a post-Suharto era, but you also see it within Indonesian Christianity.

That being said, I do think that poverty has an important role to play in the spread of Islamism in that it provides a potent breeding ground in which these Islamist messages can be disseminated and played out. For instance, the growth of Hamas can be seen in two ways; firstly - and I would argue this is the main reason for their electoral success - as a valuable provider of social welfare programmes. Secondly, as a means of protest against Israel. The two segue nicely into one another; they are providing a social good to remedy the problems of poverty associated with Israeli occupation. I don't think the Mali comparison - I read the article you posted in another thread - necessarily proves that poverty has on role to play in the problem. As I see it, it is where poverty can be linked to an external force that it comes to play its most important role; in the Gaza Strip it is perfectly easy to associate poverty with Israel and the West, something that is less easy in Mali.

I think it can also segue nicely back into the question of 'ownership of Islam'; take for instance a comparison between Morocco and Algeria which have vastly different experiences of religious violence. In the former, the Moroccan establishment can lay a fairly solid claim to 'ownership' of Islam; the Moroccan rulers can lay a claim to a familial link to the Prophet. Further to that, Islam as a means of opposition is heavily divided. By contrast, in Algeria, the FIS effectively monopolised the representation of Islam and its status as a means of protest during the 1980s, thus leading to its electoral success.

Further to this, you also have the nationalist question. Again, I can look to Hamas and Hizballah as good examples. Where previously the PLO and Fatah dominated the Palestinian cause against Israel, Hamas has effectively seized upon that and interlinked it with the Islamist agenda. I think you can see a similar process being played out in Lebanon as well as Hizballah seeks to position itself as the dominant focus not just for political Islam, but also for opposition to Israel; a question of the representation and meanings of the 'just-lived past'. A major part of this for Hizballah was the Rijalat-al-Majd exhibit which sought to create a sort of cultural narrative tying the martyrs represented to both Islam and Lebanon itself in a particularly moving example of metonymy. Incidentally, this exhibition also offered means for participation in the form of a graffiti section and a 'remembrance' section, thus tying its visitors to the exhibition, the martyrs, and their cause. I think the importance of this cultural, national aspect can also be seen in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, where one of the targets was the Khiam detention centre which had been transformed into a museum to show some of the atrocities committed by Israel during its previous occupation of Lebanon. In effect, this was an act of 'cultural erasure'; the destruction of a counter-narrative of Israeli occupation of Lebanon.

In other words, this is not just economics - as phknrocket has rightly pointed out - but nor is it a simple 'clash of civilizations' in the Huntingtonian model, a fact that becomes very much clear with any extended study of Islam and modernity. My recommendations on that would be Patricia Sloane's study of Islam, modernity, and entrepreneurship amongst the Malays and Magnus Marsden's Living Islam. I hope what I've said makes sense; my study of the topic has drawn on the work of several academics and it is quite hard to translate some of the analysis they introduce into very simple terms so in some cases I've not really tried to and in others I've probably made a hash of it. I guess just to sum it up: it's not as simple as either side sees it.

[AkSaber]

It should have been named the War on Al-Qaeda, because they were the schmucks who attacked us. Eliminate them and those who supported them.

Being named the War on Terror implies we have to go after every single organization we consider to be 'terror'. That name can also be used to distract and mislead people into a war. Hell, look at Iraq. All our government did was throw the word "terrorism" and anyone who opposed the war became an unpatriotic terrorist lover.

[Sbane]

"Terror" is a red herring. People don't want "freedom", they want jobs.

If only it were that simple...

Give them education and jobs and they'll be fine. It's just that we've never tried that.

you think most terrorist attacks have been carried out by poor, uneducated people without jobs?

Radical islam exists because of poor,uneducated people. Religion is all they have. Al qaeda is a special case imo. Most terrorists are poor are uneducated be it Egypt,Gaza,Palestine,Kashmir or Afghanistan. For example how many malaysian terrorists are there? That country is majority muslim.

None of the 9/11 hijackers were poor and only 1 was devoutly religious at that.

     He excluded Al Qaeda from his analysis.

He should exclude more than just that. I'v heard of stories where doctor's children (budding upper class) join local Islamist groups in Pakistan. While poor Muslims in Mali think OBL is deranged. Its more than just economics.

Though one notable thing I'd mention is that if Al-Qaeda is removed from the picture than so is the War on Terror. Most terrorist groups in the  Muslim world focus on local issues that the US could have conveniently ignored pre-9/11.

I think you basically proved my point there. Most terrorists are not Al-qaeda and like you said yourself they are interested more in local issues, the source of which can usually be traced back to economic conditions. Al-qaeda really attracts the crazies because of their messianic agenda of defeating the united states and taking over the world or whatever.

[phk]

"Terror" is a red herring. People don't want "freedom", they want jobs.

If only it were that simple...

Give them education and jobs and they'll be fine. It's just that we've never tried that.

you think most terrorist attacks have been carried out by poor, uneducated people without jobs?

Radical islam exists because of poor,uneducated people. Religion is all they have. Al qaeda is a special case imo. Most terrorists are poor are uneducated be it Egypt,Gaza,Palestine,Kashmir or Afghanistan. For example how many malaysian terrorists are there? That country is majority muslim.

None of the 9/11 hijackers were poor and only 1 was devoutly religious at that.

     He excluded Al Qaeda from his analysis.

He should exclude more than just that. I'v heard of stories where doctor's children (budding upper class) join local Islamist groups in Pakistan. While poor Muslims in Mali think OBL is deranged. Its more than just economics.

Though one notable thing I'd mention is that if Al-Qaeda is removed from the picture than so is the War on Terror. Most terrorist groups in the  Muslim world focus on local issues that the US could have conveniently ignored pre-9/11.

I think you basically proved my point there. Most terrorists are not Al-qaeda and like you said yourself they are interested more in local issues, the source of which can usually be traced back to economic conditions. Al-qaeda really attracts the crazies because of their messianic agenda of defeating the united states and taking over the world or whatever.

I disagree partly on economic conditions being the end-all-be-all and in Iraq's case is actually inverse with the bulk of the terrorists produced by the relatively upper-end Sunni Arab society and the main victims being the impoverished Kurds and Shi'i Arabs. Though it takes two to tango and the Shi'i Arabs are retaliating in part.   In Lebanon the main victims of the Shatila and Sabra massacres were destitute Palestinian refugees the bulk of whom were Sunnis and the perpetrators were comparatively well-off Maronites.

In Pakistan the bulk of Muslim-on-Muslim terrorism was largely due to sectarian fratricide and less to do with economics. I grew up hearing more about Sunni vs. Shi'i crap than anything else

In a sense I tend to link violence with political power and sect with economics being the result of that.