Strictly Politics

A thought on terror, terrorists, and our response

If you believe that this so called war can be won by being worse than them or just a little bit better than them...then you are doomed to continued failure after failure after failure. You cannot win the war for hearts and minds by not maintaining the moral high ground, and as has oft been stated, this is supposed to be a war for civilization. They (the Al Qaeda terrorists) believe civilization requires one set of rules, we believe it requires a completely different set. If you believe that this is a war for freedom, for alues, for civilization then you must act like it. If they choose to act like animals killing civilians, murdering children, indiscriminately maiming, torturing, and committing all manners of grotesque evil...then so be it. The whole world will turn against them until, like Cain, they have nowhere to turn.

However, should they be able to point the finger and say that the only tool they have to use is terror in the face of a greater evil, and you choose to indulge the finger pointing with evil acts of your own, then the best you can ever hope for is a stalemate of perpetual war; for they will have their supporters willing to say that evil begets evil but what choice do we have against so mighty an enemy who can deliver the ultimate evils to our doorstep?

Stop kidding yourselves, this is a war for that moral high ground and we must regain and maintain it in order to prevail. If we have already abandoned it with no wish to regain it, then all is already lost.

The greater battle is not the bombs you can drop or the people that you can kill, but rather, the minds that you can change.

This is not to say that good people should not be vigilant in protecting their citizens, that is part and parcel of 'community,' just be careful about the manner you choose to proceed with to do that. Just as we know that murderers exist on our streets, we do not want to live in communities where the knowledge that murderers exist overcome our desire to walk freely in our own streets. We know too that terror and terrorists will forever be omnipresent in one form or another- it is the nature of a noun to exist in perpetuity; however we have no desire to live every day of our lives in total fear.

posted by Garfield Jones @ 7:02 AM