Quote:
Originally posted by Lanny_MacDonald+Sep 12 2004, 06:30 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Lanny_MacDonald @ Sep 12 2004, 06:30 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-CaptainCrunch@Sep 12 2004, 06:06 PM
I didn't want to get involved in this string
Told myself it would be better if I stayed out of it
But I have to ask,
When you talk about the use of diplomacy to deal with the terrorist problem, were you talking about using diplomacy with the companies that house them, or the terrorists themselves.
If its the terrorists itself, and you open up pandora's box and give in on thier demands, you will never see a agreement reached. Israel tried to trade land for peace and all they got was an increase in terrorist activity.
Spain changed thier government and withdrew thier troops from Iraq due to the terrible bombings in that country, and all it did was embolden the terrorists/
You can't negotiate with these people, they aren't about that. Hell Yassir Arafat was given a nobel peace prize and a key position in the peace process in Palestine, and all that he's done in between stuffing his starving peoples money into Swiss Back Accounts, is to become involved in terrorist activities again
Or are you looking at the countries involved in funding, and housing terrorists? Because that dosen't work until you provide an example of why they should comply.
After 9/11 the American's tried to work with the Taliban, asking for Bin Laden to be handed over, all the Taliban did was refuse, the American's gave them time to comply and they still did nothing but stonewall. So the American's invaded.
The American's didn't get any kind of movement out of Iran, and Syria until after they dropped the hammer on Iraq.
In short form the more backwards religiously driven middleeast countries don't understand diplomacy without a prior show of force to show your intentions.
And you can't really bring the UN into that, because thier policies and work in the middle east have been fairly poorly conceived and poorly executed, and the UN is no longer a descive and strong figure anymore.
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Good points Captain, but let me ask you, how do you defeat terrorism then? Its a battle of ideologies. To me the only way you defeat that is through education and the only way you establish educational institutions is through diplomacy. Any other ideas? [/b][/quote]
I'm on two sides of the fence on defeating terrorism.
The first side is that you have to force Terrorrists away from taking the initiative. You have to find them and kill them or vanish them before they can act. That takes huge intelligence assets, and a very mobile and light force. you have to find a way to make it unprofitable for thier leaders, some and not all terrorist leaders are motivated by the payoff, so we need to find thier finances and freeze them, and let these organizations will wither and die.
People might understand and respect diplomacy but terrorists don't they don't negotiate, they take. The Spain example is a great one.
On the education thing I do agree with you, however it won't fly because a lot of the thocratic (sp?) don't want thier people to become educated in numbers because it will erode thier powerbase, so it becomes a waiting game, as you hope that the current leaders die out and more moderate forces come into place. Iran, and Syria, and Palestine don't want the majority of thier people to be able to read and formulate thier own opinions because it might lead them to question thier leadership. Something that we see in Educated Countries.
In Afganistan the Russians created a forced education program where they would take children from smoking villages and send them to Moscow to educate them in a modern workers paradise, it was thier hopes that given time it would moderate Afganistan. It failed because it created an older generation of terrorists
It might be a matter of two tiers. First you grab the radical states by the nose and scare the hell out of them, then after you do that, you can for the most part work towards moderating them.
I'm sorry I don't have a good solution that dosen't include shock and awe, there are two issues that you have to deal with.
the fact that terrorists don't care about the people that they're fighting for. The slant of religious destruction and lack of education. Makes it an impossible problem to solve. But I do know that you can't wait for these people to come to you, you have to go to them and find a way to unbalance them and make mistakes that will expose them and allow you to kill them