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what terrorists want
In response to this article in the New Yorker
The desire for control of nation states is a reasonable terrorist motivation; power lust has motivated so many criminals to government in the past. It wouldn't surprise me if bin Laden already exercises such control in Afghanistan.
However, after weeks of US attacks, bin Laden may never surface, the islamic world is more polarized and radical than ever, innocents are dying under US bombs ("precision" is relative, as is "high reliability"), they hit that Red Cross warehouse twice (how stupid is that?), the taliban quite casually execute their internal enemies, US forces are being fired on in Pakistan (!), ...
It looks to me like the response to US bombing has been to consolidate their power in Afghanistan and make the rest of the muslim world more shaky. It seems naive in the extreme to count growing hordes of bin Laden supporters as a good thing because such large numbers will allow more pro-western spies to infiltrate. We'll then be able to foil a terrorist plot every month (of course, there will then be 10 a month to deal with).
It really worries me to hear US policy advocates speak in terms of "divine mission", as if a god damned religious war were a good thing. Others speak of disengaging from the middle east as a bad thing, as if we had nothing better to do than decide from which theocracy to buy oil. But if the people in those countries can't sort out their own problems, what kind of arrogance is it to think we can do it for them? Let's get the hell out and let their gods sort them out.
This situation is so agonizing because one wants to have some solution that will get the bad guys and put everything back to normal, but I don't think it is going to happen.
I'm for stopping the bombing and increasing the reward. $25M isn't nearly enough. If $100M doesn't bring in the culprits of 9-11, then make it $150M.
This entry was posted on October 31st, 2001 at 23:48:00 by JRP and is filed under Politics, History, Culture, rants.
