Harry Boswell asks A question for the Bush supporters who may read this.
He really asked 3 questions but I didn’t charge him any more for my answers.
Q -Is there anything that bothers you about the way Bush has handled the Iraq war?
Nope- Not a gosh darn thing. In fact, I don’t even have a problem with the rebuilding effort.
Now before you call me insane, hear me out.
]]>< 
Step 1: Invade Iraq.
Step 2: ?????
Step 3: Terrorists cowed into submission.
“Hey guys, what’s step 2?”
Step 2: Kill terrorists.
Aw, nuts — Brian beat me to it. 😀
Yeah, Step 2 is definitely kill terrorists; something the Liberal-Left Democrats can’t understand.
From my observations out here in distant space, I can see that killing terrorists is something the Liberal-Left Democrats are unwilling to actually do.
You guys are on the wrong track. To paraphrase a Doritos catch-phrase and apply it to terrorists, “kill all you want, they’ll make more.” Killing terrorists doesn’t cow other terrorists into submission, it just makes the remaining terrorists more marginalized and radical. Look at what has happened in Chechenya and Israel. They killed terrorists there, and all they got were newly minted terrorists, even more desperate than the ones who were killed.
Wait! I hear you saying, “why not just kill all terrorists?” Well you can’t. Terrorists are not a race, or a nationality. You can’t kill all terrorists unless you know someway to guarantee that, after you have miraculously identified and killed all current terrorists, no one else will decide to become a terrorist. How do you do that? How do you make sure that no one will become so angry, thoughtless, and pathetically hopeless, that he or she will resort to terrorism? One thing is certain. You don’t do it by attacking a country like Iraq, which was not a sponsor of terrorism and that posed no threat to the United States.
I went to public school, so I hope you’ll forgive my ignorance. Nevertheless, I learned very early on that one of the reasons the United States was better than every other country was that we never waged war other than in self-defense. What happened to that? How could we so easily have fallen into the role of an aggressor nation?
Now, don’t tell me that Iraq posed a threat to us because of “weapons of mass destruction program related activities.” If you believe that, then I suppose you believe in alien abductions, horoscopes, and all that tripe. Iraq posed no threat. It was just a very attractive target. There are plenty of countries out there that undeniably sponsor terrorism; countries like: Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. But, we didn’t invade them because they weren’t attractive targets.
As I said earlier, we can’t eradicate terrorism, not unless we lobotomize the entire human species. Still, we can work to minimize it. We can do that with four things: bullets, security, education, and humanitarian aid. Once we identify terrorists we can kill them. Unfortunately, it’s hard to identify terrorists, so we need to strengthen our security; no more easily identifiable air marshals would be a good start. Additionally, we need massive public relations and educational campaigns to reach into every dark corner in the world teach everyone the value of life and mutual respect. Finally, we need to increase the amount, the breadth, and the effectiveness of our humanitarian aid, so that people everywhere can have hope.
Killing terrorists doesn’t cow other terrorists into submission, it just makes the remaining terrorists more marginalized and radical.
Which makes them less likely to enjoy widespread popular support, which makes them less able to recruit and fundraise, which makes them less dangerous.
Meanwhile the ones you kill are permanently deterred from committing any more acts of terrorism.
Justin, if you found a nest of scorpions just a few feet from your kid’s sandbox, would you refrain from killing them because you could never eradicate the species?
No McGehee, I would kill those scorpions. George W. Bush, on the other hand, would destroy a nest of garter snakes living in the next county. The question I have for you, McGehee, and everyone else, is can you tell the difference?
As for your earlier arguments, I submit they are not borne out by history. It doesn’t take widespread popular support for a Chechen black widow to strap bombs to herself and kill a lot of people. Nevertheless, if you had read my earlier post a little more carefully, you would have seen that I voiced support for killing identified terrorists.
I am too old to be a blogger. There is too much about this modern world that I do not understand.
I can not conceive of a young person bragging about being a conservative. In 1776 insurgents were called patriots. Now they are called terrorists. I remember the Kamikazi terrorists that just about sank our Pacific fleet. People who are willing to committ suicide are people who do not have any other alternative when they are faced with air=craft carriers and tanks. I sat in front of my TV and watched “Shock and Awe”. I could not believe that Americans would bomb a city like the Nazis bombed Warsaw and Guernica.
I can not believe that the majority of Jewish people could countenance the kind of nationalism that caused them so much pain in the holocaust.
I can not understand why the American people do not understand that war is between nations, and that they can be fooled by the hype of a “war against drugs”, or a “war against terrorism”. We spend 400 billion a year on the Pentagon and there isn’t a war in sight.
eicho de chingada madre!