rocketpig said:
That's really a ridiculous notion. There are groups attacking almost every Western nation they can find. Just "letting things be" isn't a sound solution in this case. Of course, that doesn't mean the US needs to be meddling in every world situation they feel like, either. Even if the US pulled back every military force and gave Israel the cold shoulder, there would be terrorists who want to bomb us. We have money and a different attitude about life. Don't ever convince yourself that religious fanatics need a sound reason to declare war on another people.
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I absolutely agree, and plenty of people in THIS country fall into that category as well. More people than I would like to admit look at us being in the Middle East as some kind of holy war.
My counterargument is that the true fanatics need the support of people who aren't fanatics to accomplish very much as terrorists. I estimate that the true religious fanatics who are terrorists are probably about 10-30% of whatever terrorist sect you choose. The rest are just regular people who are pissed off and got drug into the conflict for whatever reason. They joined because the interventionist policies of western nations have given them a reason to fight and gave into religious extremism because it seemed completely justified to them that they should attack country's with selfish ideologies and heavy-handed militarism to back up those ideologies.
Most terrorists are terrorists in response to Western interventionism. I agree that some percentage would be terrorists no matter what we did, but they certainly wouldn't be as strong of a force if they didn't have the regular people who have become terrorists to support them.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
