Starting with your second thought from a previous post -- I'll pick up the first one below.
BigBlue said:
It seems to me that this war is a new experience in waging war. We can't point to just one country and say there's the enemy. In this case the enemy is where we find them.
See, right here is where you and the neocons go wrong:
Wars are waged between
nations.
In the case of the present so-called "War on terrorism," the Western nations are facing a fairly loose criminal conspiracy; indeed, the most visible success to date have been due police work, not military actions. You can't stop criminals very well with solidiers, especially before they strike; what's needed are police. Calling the conflict a "war" just muddies the water -- and the thinking.
BigBlue said:
The latest group has been found in Great Britain attempting to bring down planes, but I'm sure they can be found throughout the world. That includes right here in the USA.
Yep. 'Cos crooks, petty, medium, and darned near James-Bond-villian scale, can be found just about everywhere. They have no country and just about no command structure.
Now I'm going to pick up your first thought, which I moved down in order to make my main point first.
BigBlue said:
I can't remember any war whose end could be predicted with any accuracy. This war is no exception.
You seem to mistake an end
condition for a
time. In WW II, the Allies could very well predict the end they were after: the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers. Sure enough, when this was achieved, the war was over. Korea, a bit less clear (ask MacArthur!), but returning to the boundary between North and South originally set was deemed acceptable.
But in "The War On Terror," how's that end? When there's no more
terrorism? Yah, yah, men shall beat their swords into plowshares, there will be pie in the sky and we'll all sing happy, happy songs of brotherhood...right up until some Scientologist gets peeved at an Objectivist and blows up his car, at which point,
Game On! It's unrealistic. It's right up there with "wars" on poverty, drugs and crime:
the underside is part of who we are as a species. It can be limited, controlled, corralled, patrolled...and it will always be with us. To fail to understand that is to fail to understand the nature of the struggle -- a misunderstanding made all the more obvious by calling it a "war."
BigBlue said:
I would even go a step further in saying that it would be dangerous for us to try to predict an end. It would encourage terror groups to wait us out and begin all over once we dropped out of the fray.
A known, clear end condition is only "dangerous" to those who use our fear to gather power to themselves and to control us. Y'know what the price of Liberty is? Eternal,
personal vigilance. It is
not swearing submission to somebody
else to be vigilant for you, no matter how noble he seems, no matter his Party or Faction.
BigBlue said:
I find it odd that while our soldiers are overseas laying their lives on the line to protect our civilian population from certain death at the hands of the terrorists, we have people in this country fighting to protect the rights of those same terrorists. I guess that's what really irks me about that point of view.
"Certain death?" Run the numbers; if Islamic terrorists trade deaths for deaths with the West at the same rate as happened in the World Trade Center attack, they'll run out of people long before we will!
Many more people die in traffic on a holiday weekend than died as a result of the attacks on the Pentagon and WTC on 9/11. How come we don't have a "War on moronic drivers" already? --'Cos that's not the way to fix it. I strongly suspect that for any individual U. S. citizen within the 50 states, the odds are greater of being struck by a falling piano than killed by terrorist activity.
And let's be very, very clear: in the incident under discussion, we're not addressing any "terrorists," merely some
criminal suspects arrested here in the United States, under our laws; laws which grant them the very same rights as you yourself enjoy. Laws which, generally, work. Or did I miss something big blowing up in the States in the last four+ years?
