Time to terrorize the terrorizers

We have delved very deeply down this rabbit hole. And I get that much of this discussion is really an expression of emotion…and justified outrage.

I ask that your read carefully…”listen”…and don’t jump to conclusions about what I am about to say. What I am NOT about to say is that terrorism is justified.

I believe that the old Catholic school tactic of punishing the whole class for the acts of one or two students does not work at the international level. The innocent victims of this “punishment” don’t assert peer pressure on the misbehaving students. Instead, they, in turn, exact revenge on the country that imposes the indiscriminate punishment.

An inescapable fact is that the USA is an imperialist nation. In our own way, we colonize, exploit and assert our rule around the world much as Great Britain (and every empire before them) did. It’s vital to remember that, regardless of how brutal, powerful or wealthy any empire is at a point in time, the empire will eventually fall if it generates resentment and enemies. Some empires endure for a good period of time and then fall gracefully…as did the British Empire. Others crash and burn. The fate of any empire MAY be inversely proportional to the level of brutality and injustice it imposed on subjects, colonies and opponents. The more brutal, the harder the fall.

Great Britain eventually succumbed to relentless assault by the IRA…”home-grown” terrorists who fought to eradicate injustice. The simple fact was that, when it was all said and done, there were no terrorist enclaves to level…no strongholds to obliterate. And western nations simply cannot exercise the kinds of force exploited by the old Soviet Union and China…or perhaps North Korea today. We would summarily be excommunicated from the civilized world. A fate we damned near brought upon us with our invasion of Iraq.

As much as I would like to exact vengeance on perpetrators of terrorism, life doesn’t work that way — at least not today. We must learn from the past. In the wake of WW-I, the victors exacted their pound of flesh from Germany at the expense of fostering WW-II.

Some terrorists won’t be placated by civilized behavior and abandoning colonizing, exploitative behaviors. These are likely to be the home-grown variety – the militias and other radicals who hate “society.” But international terrorism is another matter. Al-Qaeda may well be the devil incarnate, but we must never forget that Al-Qaeda is a response to US foreign policy and economic domination. One need only take a dispassionate look at US influence in the Middle East – with our puppet dictators and convenient embrace of monsters such as Saddam Hussein and MANY others – to realize that our situational ethics have played a role in fostering their hatred of us. The same can be said of our influence in South and Central America. The term “Ugly American” was coined for a reason.

So, do I support terrorism? Of course not. But part of the solution for terrorism is to stop breeding terrorists…to stop abusing other peoples of the world. As for “leveling” the terrorist strongholds, well we’ve been attempting to do quite a bit of that. We must step back and ask our selves, to borrow a phrase from, of all people, Sarah Palin, “how’s that ‘leveling’ strategy workin’ for ya?”

We have projected force, power and economic control for centuries, and it led us to where we are. Perhaps, as hard as it is to swallow, we need to try something else. The UK finally “got” this to some degree, which may explain why the British Empire never really fell, while the Roman Empire, despite the ability of a Roman citizen to walk unmolested throughout the empire at its peak, is nothing but a remarkable story in the history books.

My base instincts want vengeance, so I understand why others want vengeance, too. But I don’t think there is room in an evolved society to be “leveling” other societies as punishment for the acts of a few zealots.