Terrorism and the Left

[ParanoiA]

Well thank you Pangloss for regarding 40 as young. Thats given me a whole new perspective on my being. (joke)

Perhaps my view is one which is coloured by cynisim as I took part in politics during the eighties, stood back at times and observered. And then as now I realized how formulaic the whole political/ economic/ control game is. And yes I do see it as a game. Alliances one day then enemies the next. Most of what is really happening we are never told. The truth of what conflicts have really been about only trully surface many years after the event.

Try reading in between the lines a bit more. Don't alway accept the official line.

 

See, I agree with that. But reading in between the lines is just as irresponsible and inaccurate as anything coming out of the machine. Actions speak louder than words.

 

And I also subscribe to a little saying..."You're never as bad as they say you're bad, and you're never as good as they say you're good".

 

That's held true any time I've been able to test it...

[hypertilly]

It is irresponsible not to read in between the lines. Therin lies the potential to explore things from different angles. And if you should stumble upon an uncomfortable realization, explore it some more. Very little in life (in my experience) is either truely black or white.

[john5746]

I'm not a conservative though. I'm a little left and a little right - not a fence sitter either. More socially liberal and fiscally conservative - libertarian basically.

 

I guess I don't see the characterization as an insult but rather as fact. The democrats haven't put forth any counter terrorist efforts. I'm asking why, basically. Is it just no big deal? Like I said before, I can accept that. The Tree confirmed that and notice I didn't jump on his case at all about it. I expect the negative responses however.

 

http://www.democrats.senate.gov/agenda/real_security/act_2006/

 

There are some.

 

Do you think Bush got rid of Rumsfeld and changed course because things were going to slowly? No. He did it because of the Democrats. The Democrats wanted to concentrate on the terrorists, instead of Iraq.

 

The compromise is to allow Bush to escallate, to try something different. That is how politics works sometimes, opposing ideas and compromise.

 

That being said, I think the democrats as a whole are too soft on terrorism. I think terrorism is mainly a war of intelligence, so I think the Patriot Act was needed. I would rather sacrifice a little freedom than invade every country we think might harbor terrorists.

[Pangloss]

Perhaps my view is one which is coloured by cynisim as I took part in politics during the eighties, stood back at times and observered. And then as now I realized how formulaic the whole political/ economic/ control game is. And yes I do see it as a game. Alliances one day then enemies the next. Most of what is really happening we are never told. The truth of what conflicts have really been about only trully surface many years after the event.

Try reading in between the lines a bit more. Don't alway accept the official line.

 

Exactly. Like I said, the presumption and the focus today are on the government. We don't sit around worrying about external threats "the reds" or "fascist Germany". Nobody in this country is actively, daily worried about "terrorists" -- not with the kind of immediate hysteria that simple government actions can produce, anyway.

 

No, what we worry about are secret government plots and conspiracies. They're always there, lurking right around the corner, just so long as people "don't accept the official line" and "are careful to read between the lines". Of course, they have to be reading between the RIGHT lines. The ones they should be reading between. Not those other lines. Ew, no, not those!

 

But hey, we agree on one thing. By all means, read between the lines. ALL the lines.

[bascule]

Actually it's quite appropriate. There are varying degrees of liberals and such, but left leaning folk tend to all line up on this one.

 

I think most of "the left" agrees a "war on terror" is not a practical idea. Wars are typically fought on fronts, where terror is decentralized but operates within the borders of soverign nations. We cannot get troops to the terrorists, first because they hide among ordinary people and thus everyone is a potential terrorist, and second because they are within the borders of soverign nations who don't exactly want a "world police" (pardon the phrase) going in to search for terrorists.

 

It should be the responsibility of individual nations to locate and capture terrorists internally.

 

As to whether there are "terrorist states" which are sponsoring terrorism domestically, the top names typically are doing a decent job of locating and capturing terrorists (by that I mean Iran, and prior to the US invasion, Iraq)

 

How do you fight a war against the concept of decentralized, individual-oriented warfare which is not state-sponsored?

[the tree]

We endorse every nation on the damn planet - including Israel - and excluding hostile states.

Palestine is a hostile state now? Apart from resistance to occupation, in what way?

 

(edit: o.k. NO-ONE respond to this with an Israel/Palestine argument, the only point here was to show that plenty of people have very legitimate reasons to hate America, not to get into Zionist politics.)

 

First gulf war? Everyone hates us for liberating Kuwait? Yeah, I'm not sorry about that one either. [...]The situation with the Kurds was horrible, definitely our fault, and is the reason why I throw my hands up about everybody arguing to get out of Iraq regardless of the state of affairs.

While a few people were pissed about Kuwait, it was the Kurds that I was talking about.

 

I can only give you reassurance that America is no more perfect than any other nation. We make good decisions and bad ones. But our effects are far more reaching because we are a superpower.

Doesn't that award you the slightest bit of responsibility?

[Haezed]

I can only give you reassurance that America is no more perfect than any other nation. We make good decisions and bad ones. But our effects are far more reaching because we are a superpower

 

I'm not sure it's possible to be "more perfect" than any thing but I certainly agree that America makes good and bad decisions as is true in any human endeavor. At the same timme, I can list several other nations that I would not trust with America's power.

 

Doesn't that award you the slightest bit of responsibility?

 

Yes, according to Uncle Ben. I'm not sure what Aunt Mae would have to say on the subject.

[Pangloss]

It should be the responsibility of individual nations to locate and capture terrorists internally.

 

This is an excellent, and I think very overlooked point sometimes. It's also one of the things that our modern society has gotten right, in terms of funneling world opinion through the aparatus of the UN. That organization may be a dismal failure is many ways, but it has helped the world to produce an environment in which it can declare what is acceptable behavior from a nation. At the VERY LEAST we have a place where we can go and do that. Something that the world never had before prior to its creation. Ultimately that may be the most important thing that the 20th century is remembered for.

 

I don't entirely agree with the rest of that post (Iraq was arresting terrorists? please, they were HARBORING terrorists!). But I absolutely agree with the above.