You've been kind enough to read my ramblings this long so I suppose I owe you some sort of conclusion.
How do we fight terrorism?
As most of you may know I'm a huge U2 fan. Their latest album was titled How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. The story behind the title is an interesting one, and pertinent to the question of how to fight terrorism.
The story goes that Bono was having a discussion with Michael W. Smith on politics and religion. And Bono posed the question to Smith, "Do you know how to dismantle an atomic bomb?" Smith of course didn't know. Bono's answer, "With love."
This is, in a very simplistic form, the answer to the war on terrorism. We could kill a million terrorist, but as long as the conditions that created them still exist more will replace them.
There are several conditions which spawn terrorism, but the greatest is poverty. It is a fairly simple equation, poverty = violence. And the greater the poverty the greater the violence. If you look in any city in America you will see that the poorer neighborhoods have a much higher rate of violent crime. This is not caused by any racial, social, or even cultural factors, but by the destitution of the people.
And in cases of extreme, wide spread, poverty the danger is even greater. It is in these conditions that people will listen to a leader who offers them any reason for hope. Whether that hope is financial improvement, national pride, or religious zeal. When asked why the German people followed Hitler one man answered "Because he made the trains run on time." Germany had suffered an extreme depression following World War I and Hitler offered hope, both economically and in national pride. Similar stories could be told of Stalin, Mao, and Bin Laden.
I know that the idea of more foreign aide makes many people furious, but lets forget for a moment that the US is dead last in percent of national budget spent on aide and look at it from a very practical, national defense, point of view.
If we build schools in the Middle East children won't have to go to a Madras that teaches them to hate America. If we build jobs in the Asia a man may not be as willing to sacrifice himself for a cause (many terrorist organizations regularly recruit orphans and street kids to become suicide bombers, because they feel they have nothing to lose.) And if we give medicine to Africa people will have the simple hope to see tomorrow.
Are there times that this will not be enough? Of course, there will be times when force is necessary. But when these times do come, if we have done everything up to that point to provide for the people, we are much more likely to be welcomed as "liberators" instead of "invaders". And if so the chances of a large scale insurgency like we are now seeing in Iraq is much less likely. Che Guevara said in his field manual "Guerrilla Warfare" that you must have the populous on your side to have any chance at victory.
Perhaps most importantly if we have done all we can to exterminate the causes of terrorism, but are still forced into conflict we can do so with a certain amount of ethical clarity. Every soldier attempts to justify the reasons why he does what he must do. For most soldiers I know and from what I've heard from veterans of Vietnam and Somalia it comes down to the man on your right or on you left. We do our best to leave the politics to the politicians. But a man fighting for something he believes in is more valuable than any new military technology.
War is never a good thing, but war without conviction is pure evil.
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