Are We Losing It?
One of the things that my military training drilled into my head back when is that generals (and politicians) are always making the mistake of fighting the LAST war rather than the present one. The classic example put forth then was of the line of fortresses, the Maginot Line, which the French had erected after WW1 to keep German troops at bay in any future encounter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maginot_Line The Nazis simply zipped around these fixed fortifications through the low countries to conquer Paris.
One sees comparable fiascoes at work in our recent 'wars on terrorism', if you want to call them that. In response to 9/11 -- a horror carried out by a loose group of 19 disaffected young men (15 from our ally, Saudi Arabia, 1 from Egypt, etc.) -- the U.S. launched two Nazi type Blitzkrieg wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzkrieg on Afghanistan and Iraq. Needless to say these wars have not been won -- but the two nations have been devastated. Their peoples have now had it with our "coalition of the willing" and are bent on settling internal scores -- and driving us out.
The Israelis, too, seem to have bought into the old Nazi model -- blow them away from the air (Gaza and Lebanon), make the people suffer for the wrong-doing of the terrorists embedded among them -- collective punishment -- to make Israel loved around the globe?
Needless to say neither of these war scenarios is doing more than turning the flagellated populations against us and providing vivid recruiting images for yet more disaffected young men (and women) with no greater hopes and aspirations than making a grand entrance into the afterlife.
So now a murky collection of individuals has been arrested with the suspicion that their hand luggage had been intended to carry bombs to blow away a clutch of planes crossing the Atlantic? Nice final trip for our tourists returning from visits over there.
At this writing the national origins of the persons suspected have not been disclosed. However, I doubt that 'shock and awe' bombings of their home countries will do much in the way of deterring future terrorists. Nor will Israel's crude destruction of the infrastructures of Gaza and Lebanon win Israelis peace in their lifetimes. They have missed a critical opportunity. They might rather have made a direct appeal for assistance and peace to those also trapped by the mad bombers embedded among them.
Back to reality -- several years prior to 9/11 in Brooklyn a roommate of two guys planning to bomb a major subway transfer station at Franklin Avenue turned them in. What might have been a deadly attack was averted by a fellow human being who also happened to be a Muslim, but one who cared. The only way to defeat terrorists is to persuade our fellow humans that such is not the way to go. By lashing out blindly at innocent victims, we defeat our only effective tool for defeating terrorism.
When 9/11 occurred we gained nearly universal sympathetic global responses which created an opportunity for humanity to join together to halt brutal terrorist aberrations in the future. Instead, both we and Israel and have blown it. We allowed our incompetent pols and our own crazies to launch mad state terrorist attacks against precisely those who would otherwise have been our friends and allies in a real war on terror. We have let these incompetents promote their private wars for dubious reasons -- is it really oil, a revival of the tired old British Empire, more American marauding though the lives of others in our imperial self interest, colonies in occupied territories? We have been fighting the wrong war in the wrong places at the wrong times -- Britain, Israel, and the U.S. -- and we are losing it!
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Israel_Palestine
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net
One sees comparable fiascoes at work in our recent 'wars on terrorism', if you want to call them that. In response to 9/11 -- a horror carried out by a loose group of 19 disaffected young men (15 from our ally, Saudi Arabia, 1 from Egypt, etc.) -- the U.S. launched two Nazi type Blitzkrieg wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzkrieg on Afghanistan and Iraq. Needless to say these wars have not been won -- but the two nations have been devastated. Their peoples have now had it with our "coalition of the willing" and are bent on settling internal scores -- and driving us out.
The Israelis, too, seem to have bought into the old Nazi model -- blow them away from the air (Gaza and Lebanon), make the people suffer for the wrong-doing of the terrorists embedded among them -- collective punishment -- to make Israel loved around the globe?
Needless to say neither of these war scenarios is doing more than turning the flagellated populations against us and providing vivid recruiting images for yet more disaffected young men (and women) with no greater hopes and aspirations than making a grand entrance into the afterlife.
So now a murky collection of individuals has been arrested with the suspicion that their hand luggage had been intended to carry bombs to blow away a clutch of planes crossing the Atlantic? Nice final trip for our tourists returning from visits over there.
At this writing the national origins of the persons suspected have not been disclosed. However, I doubt that 'shock and awe' bombings of their home countries will do much in the way of deterring future terrorists. Nor will Israel's crude destruction of the infrastructures of Gaza and Lebanon win Israelis peace in their lifetimes. They have missed a critical opportunity. They might rather have made a direct appeal for assistance and peace to those also trapped by the mad bombers embedded among them.
Back to reality -- several years prior to 9/11 in Brooklyn a roommate of two guys planning to bomb a major subway transfer station at Franklin Avenue turned them in. What might have been a deadly attack was averted by a fellow human being who also happened to be a Muslim, but one who cared. The only way to defeat terrorists is to persuade our fellow humans that such is not the way to go. By lashing out blindly at innocent victims, we defeat our only effective tool for defeating terrorism.
When 9/11 occurred we gained nearly universal sympathetic global responses which created an opportunity for humanity to join together to halt brutal terrorist aberrations in the future. Instead, both we and Israel and have blown it. We allowed our incompetent pols and our own crazies to launch mad state terrorist attacks against precisely those who would otherwise have been our friends and allies in a real war on terror. We have let these incompetents promote their private wars for dubious reasons -- is it really oil, a revival of the tired old British Empire, more American marauding though the lives of others in our imperial self interest, colonies in occupied territories? We have been fighting the wrong war in the wrong places at the wrong times -- Britain, Israel, and the U.S. -- and we are losing it!
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Israel_Palestine
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net
posted by Ed Kent at 8:43 AM
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