Taking him [Arafat] out would not only advance the prospects for peace in the region but would show to every Palestinian terrorist that Israel means business and that the days of moral cowardice and appeasement towards its enemies are over; it would show that Israel will no longer cave in to "world opinion" or to pressure from American presidents.
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Randian stupidities aside, we can see that faith in force escalation as a method for ending hostilities is commonly held around the globe. You hear all sorts of people stating it in one form or another everyday.
It's odd that this belief should persist when there's a mountain of evidence pointing to the opposite conclusion - particularly in the present age when technology and knowledge dispersal have given each individual the ability to participate in low scale warfare.
We know that the US Calvary and settlers used force escalation to repress (and nearly wipe out) plains tribes such as the Lakota in the 19th century. But things would have been far less settled if the tribal groups had access to the means used by terrorists now.
I think military wonks call the new situation fourth generation warfare.
Just yesterday, a colleague told me that he felt the US wasn't being "ruthless enough" in the war on terror(tm). If only we amped up the pace - bombing more, invading more, using nukes, essentially going completely mad in our application of technodeath methodologies "the terrorists would know we mean business and stand the fuck down."
I suggested that intelligence and old fashioned detective work would go farther, harm fewer innocents and, in the process, produce fewer new nihilists.
He was shocked at my naivete.
Force is apparently all this breed of subhuman - the terrorist - who apparently rose from the murky depths of the earth uncaused understands. "But" I said, "anyone can at anytime choose to become what we call a terrorist. It's not a tribe of people who can be penned in or genocided off the face of the earth. It's a mode of action, like being a bank robber, that's available to just about anyone. So killing lots of people to 'prove your point', unless you kill everyone but a carefully monitored few, is an evil act that solves nothing."
"No" he insisted, "more force is what's needed."
This is a pretty common notion.
We have a tendency to believe all sorts of things in spite of contradictory evidence. I think it's one of our many collective cognitive weaknesses as a species.
Maybe it served some useful function during our evolution. Maybe it's just a flaw in our wiring that was never helpful.
It certainly is not helping us now, in the nuclear age of terror, climate change and quite literally dead-end global economics.
DRM
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