I just wrote this in response to a friend’s post on LiveJournal regarding Israel. It was a random musing of sorts, but I thought it would be interesting to throw it out here.
By all means, please tear this apart. 🙂 It’s more of a brain dropping than an absolute, calculated belief.
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The fact is, terrorist cells and organizations, by their very nature, are nearly impossible to wipe out completely. They’re like a virus (Mr. Anderson); their ability to replicate and stay out of sight is impressive, and it’s very hard to attack them without doing severe damage to the body they inhabit. In this case, Lebanon.
I just wrote this in response to a friend’s post on LiveJournal regarding Israel. It was a random musing of sorts, but I thought it would be interesting to throw it out here.
By all means, please tear this apart. 🙂 It’s more of a brain dropping than an absolute, calculated belief.
————————
The fact is, terrorist cells and organizations, by their very nature, are nearly impossible to wipe out completely. They’re like a virus (Mr. Anderson); their ability to replicate and stay out of sight is impressive, and it’s very hard to attack them without doing severe damage to the body they inhabit. In this case, Lebanon.
Furthermore, their heirarchy is so spread out that you cannot behead the dragon. Nor can you capture your opponent’s major supply centers or invade their country. Again, they are too diverse.
So it follows, therefore, that if we cannot achieve victory through defeating their leaders, conquering their territory, or even annihilating them completely, we must adopt a new way to win.
So, flying in the face of all conventional military thought (which has gotten us nowhere with this new enemy), I propose we must fight an almost purely defensive battle. We don’t outsmart them, we don’t outmaneuver them. We simply outlast them. There’s an old Irish saying that in war, it’s not those who can inflict the most, it’s those who can suffer the most that emerge victorious. And we can take a lot more than they can, if we only would realize it.
Because we’re big (I’m speaking mostly of America here, but it applies on a lesser level to Israel as well, so long as Israel maintains its friendships with big countries). We’re very big. And we can take a hell of a lot more than they’ve been dishing out so far. Looked at from a purely statistical standpoint, September 11th was barely a scratch on the surface of America’s numbers and strength. Al-Qaeda’s best minds spent years of preparation and planning, consumed a large amount of resources throwing themselves into a concerted attack, and a few years later we find that Nature, acting in her normal completely random way, can dwarf their best efforts when it comes to devastation. Al-Qaeda did not hurt us that deeply on September 11th. What ended up screwing us over was that we overreacted.
Our problem is that as a country we’re still pursuing the myth of perfect safety. But so long as we accept that the occasional attack, no matter how hard we try to safeguard against it, is an inevitability, and learn to live with them, then we remove the “terror” from the equation. Once we start expecting them, they stop taking us by surprise, and we can both prepare and budget for them. Storing up grain against the inevitable bad harvest, if you will. Terrorist threats are then no longer the boogeyman, the horrible possibility that keeps us up at night, but become instead(at least in the national consciousness) a frustration, an annoyance. On an individual level it’s no less heartwrenching to those who are affected by the strikes, but from the perspective of a community or a nation they can be thought of as minor inconveniences. And in so thinking we say to our enemies: “We will be here long, long after time has taken its toll on you.”
Terrorist groups have hardly ever lasted for even a generation, as evil always finds a way to turn upon itself. A strong nation lasts for centuries.
Also, taking this stance frees up a ton of resources that were previously wasted attacking targets that vanished as soon as we arrived and left us no safer than before. And those resources can be put to tremendous humanitarian use. A group based out of Rome analyzed what could have been done with the money that we’ve thrown at Iraq in the past few years – hundreds of billions of dollars – and determined that such money would have been sufficient to bring clean water to every single person on the globe. Every town, every village, every camp.
That’s obviously an extreme example, but if we start implementing programs even a fraction as large, over time the terrorist recruiters will find their pool drying up quickly. Violent religious fervor *thrives* on poverty. Improve your average person’s lot in life, and they’ll be less likely to turn desperate and angry.
So that’s my plan for long-term victory.
Of course, there’s one tiny little thing that throws a wrench in this entire argument: the atom. Or, more precisely, the fact that it can be split.