At 11:52 AM 12/13/03 -0500, John Kelsey wrote:
..
>One interesting property of the lone warriors is that they can't >actually make peace.
Good points, but not entirely true. For instance, we could stop the
Jihad (tm) (including future Jihads by other parties) by stopping all foreign aid,
following the good general's advice, "Trade with all, make treaties with none, and
beware of foreign entanglements."
So, I think that's pretty sound advice, but I don't think any of the top ten reasons for supporting it involve whether Al Qaida will stop attacking us. Maybe they will, maybe they won't, but our foreign policy ought to be made based on what is in our long-term best interest ("our" meaning American citizens); realistically, terrorist attacks are a fairly small part of that calculation. For example, we could presumably beat China in a war, but such a war would be enormously more expensive and dangerous than fighting Al Qaida. If continuing to play world's policeman improves our chances of avoiding war with China, at the cost of bringing about some attacks from Al Qaida, that's a win for us.
Now, I suspect that playing world's policeman does *not* make us less likely to get into really dangerous and expensive war, and often gets us caught up in little wars that could expand into bigger ones. (The Korean war apparently came relatively close to getting us into a war with China, for example.) But there's at least some argument to be made about that--for example, by ensuring the security of Japan and Germany, we have avoided having two potentially very well-armed and dangerous opponents wandering around, possibly going on an empire-building spree that would have forced us into a nuclear war with them sooner or later.
..
>Of course, there's a more fundamental problem with surrendering to the >lone warriors. Imagine that there's such a wave of pro-life terrorism that >we finally agree to ban abortion. You're a fanatically committed >pro-choice activist. What's your next move?
Rudolph bombed clinics, not random people because the govt allowed the clinics. Contrast with a distributed jihad which attacks citizens to sway a govt.
Isn't he alleged to have also done the Olympic Park bombing? (Who knows whether he really did, or whether the FBI just assumed he had so they'd only have one domestic terrorist at large.)
Anyway, my point is that it's never going to be acceptable for the US government to pull out of making decisions about policy within the US. A campaign of terrorism against abortion clinics, or against liquor stores, or against bookstores, can't be responded to by changes in policy to appease the terrorists without giving up on any kind of a free society.
--John Kelsey, [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP: FA48 3237 9AD5 30AC EEDD BBC8 2A80 6948 4CAA F259
