SickpuPpyNinja Rockstar!
1,100 posts
Location: Denver, Co. U.S.A.


Posted:
So the US has been in the grip of a huge terrorism scare for sometime now, and we have the whole T.W.A.T. deal (The War Against Terrorism, for those who don't know). Isreal has been in the grips of terrorism from the moment of its birth as a country. Northern Ireland has been fighting terrorism for what, fourty years now?

If bombing and shooting terrorists works, why hasn't it worked yet?

Jesus helps me trick people.


Raymund Phule (Fireproof)Enter a "Title" here:
2,905 posts
Location: San Diego California


Posted:
SickPuppy, your asking the wrong question, the question you should be asking is, Is it worth not doing anything about?

Man we may never stop terrorisim, but we can hurt it.

Some say do nothing, if you do nothing and these groups get stronger, better equiped, maybe even a nuke... how much is New York worth?? When the WTC fell it took out other buildings, and thousands of people. How much was the damage estamate? 2 maybe 3 billion??

What about a city?

Can you afford to do nothing?

If you cant, do you have a better suggestion?

Some Jarhead last night: "this dumb a$$ thinks hes fireproof"


King Of Bongoaddict
522 posts
Location: Berlin


Posted:
Unfortunately the americans are new to "terrorism" and know relatively little about it (as opposed to countries such as britain/spain/russia-although the latter don't seem to know how to handle it). They have had to undergo a crash-course since S11. Doing nothing about it would be a fantastic error, but the way they have gone about it is pretty badly. In deciding to wage a war against it they have drastically underestimated the necessity of international co-operation. In doing so, they have only aggravated their situation (unilateral invasion of coalition forces has made/resucitated a lot of enemies) and driven terrorist activity further into hiding rather than obliterating it.
In Israel, the harsh occupation of the west bank has done nothing to stop the suicide bombers.
Bombing and shooting terrorists doesnt work. Improving international safety measures/police co-operation does.

Another thing is that the problem with S11 was that it was a new kind of terrorism- internationally endorsed terrorism stemming from many different anti-western countries. As far as i can see, all other terrorism is based on the violence of a few die-hard souls trying to achieve self-determination for their people (the irish from british rule, the basques from spanish rule, the chechens from russian rule, the palestinians from israeli rule...). This new kind is unfortunately simply based on hate and bringing the west down. I can only see everyone joining together against it as being an effective countermeasure. Sadly the US has decided to brave it alone.

Your life is ending one minute at a time...
So live it.


colemanSILVER Member
big and good and broken
7,330 posts
Location: lunn dunn, yoo kay, United Kingdom


Posted:
kob - i'd agree with most of what you said there (i'd say in general i consider your posts well thought out and excellently expressed).
however, i don't think you can say the usa is 'new to terrorism'. certainly, being attcked directly is a somewhat rare phenomenon for them but the us administration has done some of the best work in working to eradicate terrorism - clinton in northern ireland and the recent publication of the roadmap to peace are just two examples.

ray - yes we do have a better suggestion!
labelling the work being done to stop terrorism world-wide as a 'war' is oxymoronic (not sure if thats in the dictionary but its perfect here) at best.
"if we catch you trying to shoot at us we'll shoot you" is not going to intimidate a terrorist at all! diplomatic solutions reached between the international community (or at least the un) and countries that fund terror organisations would be a better start i think.

"i see you at 'dis cafe.
i come to 'dis cafe quite a lot myself.
they do porridge."
- tim westwood


King Of Bongoaddict
522 posts
Location: Berlin


Posted:
true, I agree on the Clinton bit, I was slightly exaggerating there, but they have hardly pulled their weight about countering terrorism before as they had never been directly attacked by anyone with a purpose other than insanity (atlanta bombings).
I get the feeling that the new proposal for peace in palestine could have come a long time ago had the US wished to help rather than use it as a PR publicity boost... having said that, agreably it is a good move to counter terrorism.

Your life is ending one minute at a time...
So live it.


Tikamember
106 posts
Location: BC, Canada


Posted:
quote:
Man we may never stop terrorisim, but we can hurt it.


Just like the US hurt the import of drugs through it "War on Drugs" policy. (sarcasm)
This war on terrorism is just another excuse to spread more unwanted US foreign policy that nobody wants. I'm not for sure but it seem the US government spend more on military and foreign policy then they do on their on people (health, education, social programs, ect..).
Bombing and shooting terrorist doesn't work because it add fuel to the fire. Gives them another excuse to hate you and bomb you back. I think that a more diplomatic approach should have been taken.

Kabukimanmember
42 posts
Location: Washington, USA


Posted:

Its true that the US is a spoiled child of a country. If what happened in the US happened anywhere else in the world, say for instance South Africa, nobody would have given it a second thought.

The US is lacking in experience and other fundamentals that a superpower should have when it claims that title. We are a young nation... so our place in the world is comparable to a 16 year old with a Lambourgini Diablo. We don't understand that the power we have should be used responsibly.

Its partly because we are, for the most part, a Lutheran Society. We abuse what power we have and as long as nobody says anything otherwise we will continue to. In anyway we wish.

We are also greedy and like to show off.

The US doesn't understand that fighting terrorism with violence doesn't work, and we will continue to do so until we are satisfied. Our lack of experience never taught us that violence calls and feeds violence.

I wouldn't know... I've never given a cartoon character an orgasm.


Raymund Phule (Fireproof)Enter a "Title" here:
2,905 posts
Location: San Diego California


Posted:
I have yet to hear a soloution and by the way how do you have peace talks with people that you cant find?

The terroist cells in Isrial the UK and Spain are a bit easier to find.

It is a new type of terrorisim and yes the US is rather new to it and yes the US is a very young country.

You cant hit what you cant see, but you can hit those that support whoever you cant see.

Okay so the war or terrorists isnt going good, but the war on the terrorists' supporters is.

The Taliban was wiped out and Saddam (is he related to Al Qieda or not really doesnt matter) is gone, there are two less regimes that a terrorist cell can get aid from.

Lets say your the worlds strongest person, and there was no way I could kill you using physical means, IE shooting, hitting ETC... But if I suck all the air out of the room you are in, you will suffocate and die. I cut off your supply and no matter how strong you are, you will eventually die.

That should be the focus of the war.

Some Jarhead last night: "this dumb a$$ thinks hes fireproof"


Tikamember
106 posts
Location: BC, Canada


Posted:
quote:
I cut off your supply and no matter how strong you are, you will eventually die.

So I guess the US should start by looking in their own backyard being that they've supplied and trained more than there fair share of terrorist and dictators, ie Bin Laden, Saddam Hussien. Some dictators even got a chance to train in the US at the " US Army School of Americas", ie Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador, and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia. Not to mention removing democratically elected governments and helping to bring a dictator, ie Augusto Pinochet.
So maybe stop spending so much money on foreign policy and pay more attention to what goes on in your own country.
You don't think more terrorist organization are going to pop up due to the invasion of Iraq? Like I said it's the same with the war on drugs, you think you are cutting off the supplies but after years and year of fighting drugs are more prevalent, jails are over flowing, there's corruption of law enforcement officers, ect.. Not to mention the damage done to the enviroment and people in other countries where pesticides are sprayed as part of US foreign policy.
I'm don't know what can be done to eradicate terrorism but why try something that has shown not to work. Political leaders have the power to change the world but rarely do.

Raymund Phule (Fireproof)Enter a "Title" here:
2,905 posts
Location: San Diego California


Posted:
Tika, I honestly thing that with drugs, the punishments should be more harsh. Make selling drugs equal to that of murder, or being cought with drugs equal to that of carrying a concield weapon.

Hopfully that would make drugs not worth the effort.

America trained people to work against communist governments, this backfired, to a point. Not all who were trained came back to bite the hand that fed them. Iraq was supplied with weapons and by weapons I mean stuff that was old when it was given to them! They also aquired alot of stuff from black market deals.

Iraq was supplied to fight off Iran and the communist parties there.

This was the case with many places. Some turned alot didnt.

I dont know if more terrorist groups will show up, and hopfully the job situation will improve in both Iraq and Afganistan so that people wont need to join such groups to feed themselves and their familes.

Some Jarhead last night: "this dumb a$$ thinks hes fireproof"


DaiTenshimember
104 posts
Location: Stillwater, OK


Posted:
I'm really just getting tired of comming here and being told how bad my country is and how I should never support it in anything it does......

Not like any of you would miss my "conservative" views. Seriously being one of like 3 people who bothers to intelligently post against the few dozen people on the opposing side (not saying you guys don't post intelligently, I'm saying that of those who agree with me only a handful seem to put serious consideration into what they say) is incredibly depressing, and the fact that not a one of you would ever change your mind no matter how many pages worth of arguement I waste my time on doesn't really help either.

Tell someone they're a moron everyday and eventually he's just gonna quit.... or maybe go insane, but I don't wanna do that.

No one knows me like I do.


Tikamember
106 posts
Location: BC, Canada


Posted:
quote:
Tika, I honestly thing that with drugs, the punishments should be more harsh. Make selling drugs equal to that of murder, or being cought with drugs equal to that of carrying a concield weapon.

Hopfully that would make drugs not worth the effort.

You don't seem to realise that punishments have gotten a lot harsh. Currently there are people serving life without parole for non-violent drug law violation because of mandatory minimum sentencing. According to U. S. Sentencing Commission you have more people in jail for drugs serving just as long sentences (and the case of sexual abuse, longer) then you do for violent crimes or firearms. Drugs offendener make up 41% of jails. US is the current world leading jailer. That alone doesn't seem to deter people from selling and consuming drugs.
quote:
America trained people to work against communist governments, this backfired, to a point. Not all who were trained came back to bite the hand that fed them.
But it's not just about biting "the hand that fed them" , it's also about the amount of people tortured and killed by the dictators I perviously mentioned. You don't think that the fact that the US helped these dictators, no matter in how small a way is enough to piss people of and distrust the US intentions?

King Of Bongoaddict
522 posts
Location: Berlin


Posted:
The basque terrorist cells in spain/france (the basque terrorists hide in both and probably more countries) are extremely hard to find...
the police spend years and possibly decades after a some people, but eventually they get them. They are not shot, or sentenced to death, the fear of harshness of the punishment isn't going to stop them. They go to prison for life (depending on what they have done). Every time I see that they have arrested a terrorist in france and the police are handing the guy/girl straight over to the spanish police to be judged I feel extremely pleased. But it is through international co-operation that this is achieved. Admittedly this is a new type of hate-terrorism but I think the principle for tackling it should be the same- helping each other rather than ignoring the UN.

I'm sorry daitenshi if you feel this way, but we can't just follow a government blindly without questioning what it does... half the people didn't even vote for the current US government...
I know a hell of a lot of nice people in the US all with different political points of view if it makes you feel any better? I dont mean to insult you in anyway by stating my point of view, but I am not going to support ideas that I think are wrong/misguided. The forum is here for discussion, and if anyone proves a strong enough case for something in my eyes I will gladly convert to their views. So far I have seen two sides fairly clear cut in their views battling it out, I like this, it would be a fairly boring forum if everyone just agreed.
I am open to a change of opinion, but the case needs to be proved first...

If you think its just the US that is criticised here' something to think about- I think spain has suffered a massive blow to its democracy and has lost its way in the war against terrorism. With the climate of zero-tolerance to terrorism which now prevails throughout the world (not just the US) our current government took the chance to slip in a new amendment to the constitution which bans all parties linked in anyway to terrorist activities.

One of the most popular political parties in the basque country was made illegal. These people are now trying to build a new political party to get round the law with exactly the same people as before! The spanish government is trying to block this, and if it does where do you think a load of disillusioned people looking for self-determination will turn to for a solution?
If the new party is made illegal it is taking the voice away from a fairly large group of people. That, whatever their views, is not democracy.

I think the US has created much of its current dilemma- you would have thought they would have learnt ages ago that democracy was the way forwards (rather than training a load of people guerilla warfare and helping what they blatantly knew were going to be dictatorships thinking it was the lesser of two evils). I think they have learnt a few things from their mistakes and are doing well to oversee the installation of a new democracy in Iraq (although I doubt it will be impartial to what government gets elected but that remains to be seen).

As for the drugs- i think hard drugs should have a harsh penalty and soft drugs should be semi-legalised. This would bring a divide between smugglers, raise the price of hard drugs and decrease the overall demand from them. I know my view has flaws, but I'm not really that informed about the drug trade...

Your life is ending one minute at a time...
So live it.


SickpuPpyNinja Rockstar!
1,100 posts
Location: Denver, Co. U.S.A.


Posted:
I find myself agreeing with Micheal Medved of all people, that semi-retarded right wing pundatoid, when he said in the USA Today that "America needs to persue 'prevention and protection' not punishment."

While George Bush is quoted as saying "The only way to persue peace is to persue those who threaten it."

What?
No, violence only begets violence, and besides that there is absolutly no effective way to fight terrorism on any sort of a government level. That's why it's so effective.
Even if we could somehow erraticate all those little terrorist orginizations it's still piss poor military strategy, because all we're doing is creating more, and more, and more terrorists. Can you imagine what these people's kids are going to be like? Look no further than those little Palistinian kids throwing rocks at Isreali tanks. We are going to be dealing with hate on a scale we could never imagine if we keep on like this.

Perhaps the real irony is that if more people knew why 9/11 actually happend, we might not be so eager to bomb them and we'd be much more pissed at our own government.

In an interview published in Frace in 2001 Jimmy Carter's National security advisor all but bragged that six or so months before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan we began training and arming the Meshahadin gurrillas.
In 1979 our CIA along with Pakistan's ISI (inter service intelligence agencey) launched the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA. The purpose was to harness the energy of the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and Turn it into a holy war which would trun Muslim countries inside the Soviet Union against the communist regime and eventually destabelize it. This was supposed to be the Soviet Union's Vietnam. Over the years through the ISI the CIA recruted over 100,000 Mushahadin gurillas from over 40 Islamic countries. The irony is that while the Afghan people were unaware that their jihad was being fought on behalf of Uncle Sam, we were equally unaware that we were funding a future holy war against ourselves.
After ten years of relentless conflict the Russians withdrew leaving, litterally, a country of rubble. During the Soviet occupation, however, the Mushahadin had orderd farmers to plant opium poppies as a revolutionary tax and the ISI set up hundreds and hundreds of heroin laboratories all over. Within two years of the CIA's arrival the Pakistan/Afghanistan border land had become the largest producer of heroin in the world and the largest source of the heroin on US streets, the annual profits said to be between 100 and 200 billion dollars (so much for the war on drugs,eh). This money was plowed back into training and arming militants including one young Osama Bin Laden. In 1989 when the Soviets pulled out did we make any effort to rebuild Afghanistan? Did we even say so much as thank you for letting us use your country as a killing feild? No. And in that part of the world this US abandonment of Afghanistan is known as "The great betrayal". This was one of the things that, according to Binladen himself, that made him turn his sights on America, along with our first gulf war, and the British having come in to the middle east many many years before and carving up the Ottoman empire and creating countries like Jordan and Iraq out of thin air.

I also wonder how much of this we would be dealing with now had we not, in the 1950's, overthrown the democraticly elected government of Muhammed Masadeig in Iran, and install the Shaw into power, who was lividly hated by his own people, so much so that he had to constantly wage military war (funded largely by the US) against his own Iranian citizens.
Eventually the people of Iran overthrew the Shaw anyway, but at a great price. The Shaw had killed off, litterally, all moderate, non-religious opposition to his rule, so the only people that were left were violent Islamic fundamentalists like Iatola Humeini. Once Humeini and the Mulla's got into power violent Islamic uprisings began to erupt all over the middle east and beyond, down into Africa, up into the muslim territories of the soviet union and so on.

No matter how "patriotic" (and I use the word loosely) we're supposed to be, and are suppose to want to go kick ass in Afghanistan, and go kick ass in Iraq (where we still haven't found any of the weapons that we went to war over in the first place), most of the problems in the middle east are a result of the US sticking it's nose where it didn't belong and wasn't invited. And the only thing that bombing these people is going to do is insure that there are going to be an endless supply of hateful people who are angry enough at us to blow themselves up just so they can take out a few of us along with them.

"Will we ever realize that we will be safer, more secure and enjoy a better quality of life when the rest of the world isn't left in poverty so we can have cheep oil, and cheap running shoes?" - Micheal Moore

[ 11. May 2003, 10:50: Message edited by: SickpuPpy ]

Jesus helps me trick people.


SickpuPpyNinja Rockstar!
1,100 posts
Location: Denver, Co. U.S.A.


Posted:
There.
That shut you all up.

Jesus helps me trick people.



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