John D. Giorgis wrote: > At 03:11 PM 7/24/2003 -0500 Horn, John wrote: > >I don't know. It is a scary proposition. We cannot defeat > every terrorist > >in the world. > > We cannot? Then why is it that suicide bombing is almost unheard of > almost everywhere in the world? It doesn't strike me that > this problem is > necessarily pervasive in humanity at all.
Which problem doesn't seem necessarily pervasive? The suicide bombers or the terrorists? If you are talking about the former, then I can only be grateful that the idea hasn't found *too* many takers outside the mid-east. But if you are talking about terrorism as a whole, rather than a small subset of terrorists, then the problem is pervasive enough all over the world. In fact, it has been increasing continuously for the last 6 odd decades. India alone has been suffering from terrorism for more than two decades now. To go back to the first question though, no, you cannot possibly neutralise/kill every single terrorist in the world. There would always be someone crazy enough to hate to that degree and resourceful enough to access the weapons our species is so good at producing. What you *can* do is make it hard for the nut-cases to get the public support and funds they need to operate. And that is a life-long process. It is not something that would get over in a year or two or even a decade or two. And if this war-time emergency status continues within the US for that decade or two, with suspicion directed towards a group of your own people, public resentments simmering, chances are that you Merkins would be too busy with home-grown terrorism to worry overly much about international terrorism. > >We cannot stop every rogue state that wants to build a nuke > >or a biological bomb. > > I disagree with this as well. With intelligence, the US > armed forces are > likely to be able to launch successful preemptive strikes against any > likely such rogue state for the next 100 years. *chuckle* What kind of intelligence? The kind that talked of the WMDs in Iraq or the kind that alerted you to what the subcontinent was upto in the late 90s? TWAT lacks many a thing and the list of missing essential items includes realistic aims and objectives. Ritu _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
