| The solution to our terrorism problem isn't to confiscate grandmas nail clipper at the airport. The long term solution is to reverse the foreign policy direction that we've been pursuing for the last 60 years and stop making enemies all over the world. |
| We must address the problem of terrorism in both the short term and the long term. Our failure to address the long term elements have created our short term dilemma.
Short term Forcing little Courtney to take her shoes off at the airport so they can be x-rayed or confiscating Susie Secretaries nail polish is not making anyone any safer. It is simply theater designed to create the illusion of safety among the traveling public so that they will continue to buy tickets so that the airline industry doesn't go broke during the current economic collapse. (That was caused, incidentally, by the same federal government's failure to regulate the financial services sector.) In the short term, the real solution is to attempt to keep tabs on every aggrieved person in the entire world who might conceivably be considering (or who might consider in the future) a suicide attack on the US. The problem isn't that we can't track these people, it's that we are actually so good at tracking them that we generate an enormous tidal wave of data every day . . .far more than any real-world agency can even begin to analyze. So the only realistic short-term solution is to keep tabs on as many of these people as we can, make our best attempt to keep them off of planes, away from trains, busses, rental trucks and any other implement that might be used by a terrorist, and accept that there will be occasions when we simply fail and that every now-and-then, one will slip through the cracks. Long term Beyond the short term approach, we have to begin to come to grips with why there are so many people around the world that want to kill us. We will never succeed in sopping up the mess if we don't, at some point, turn off the spigot. Since the end of the second world war, the US has been busy systematically overthrowing democratically elected governments around the world and replacing them with tyrannical dictators whose only concession in return for American support has been to allow US corporations to exploit their populations and usurp their natural resources for profit. Just after WWII, President Truman created the CIA to be an intelligence agency whose mission was to gather information that would allow the US government to thwart another attack along the lines of Pearl Harbor. But soon after the CIA was created, the Dulles brothers began the process (which continues to this day) of corrupting the primary mission of the agency from one of intelligence gathering into one of foreign covert operations. Since its creation, the CIA has been instrumental in overthrowing democratically elected governments and installing brutal puppet dictators around the world. In the long term, the only way we will gradually dissipate the terrorist threat against the US is to reverse this policy and stop making enemies all over the world for the sake of rich American's profit. Just as throwing a brick into a bee hive doesn't make one less likely to be stung, sending Predator drones into Pakistan to bomb neighborhoods doesn't make one less likely to be attacked in retribution. They kill some of ours, then we kill some of theirs, then they kill some of ours, then we kill some of theirs …..and on and on, until no one even remembers who started it, until "reason stops and killing just takes over." Finally, one side has to have the courage not to seek revenge and stop the cycle. Do Americans have the kind of courage and wisdom it takes to "turn the other cheek?" |
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