July 7, 2005 by lonbud
Blowin’ In The Wind
It’s quite something how exploding metal can ruin your day, isn’t it?
Surely nothing the people of Afghanistan or Iraq may have been doing on any given Thursday during the last several years could rival in importance what the multitudes of London were about this morning, when a series of coordinated explosions killed dozens and injured upwards of seven hundred people.
And yet, in the case of Iraq, this kind of thing has been a daily occurance for some time now. In Afghanistan it’s ebbed and flowed since the Americans came to rid the planet of Taliban, though it seems senseless mayhem may be on the rise there as well.
Predictably, today’s bombings in Britain elicited calls for a redoubling of efforts to “smoke out the godless cowards” who would resort to killing innocent civilians to further some political end. Both British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President George Bush, speaking from the G8 summit in Scotland, vowed to spare no expense or effort to prevail against those who would, in Mr. Blair’s words, “seek to change our country or our way of life by these methods.” He said, “we will not be changed.”
In a nut, and in a shell: we can’t kill them fast enough!
Bush and Blair have their story and they are sticking to it. And by God, it’ll be with their last breaths, each of them, they denounce and condemn the godforsaken extremists who refuse to understand or accept ‘our way of life.’
Defense budgets are destined to expand, and death shall be decreed no reprieve. More and more of our resources will be poured into the very maw of government waste and inefficiency so often decried by the so-called conservative movement.
And every now and then, the ‘terrorists’ will bring it home to us: we remain on the wrong track.
Michael Herdegen - July 10, 2005 @ 12:52 am
You seem to miss the point that Afghanistan and Iraq were REACTIONS to terror attacks, and did not precede them.
In fact, the U.S. did not much when the WTC was bombed in ’93, our embassies in Africa were bombed in ’98, and our servicemembers bombed at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia and on board the USS Cole, all by the same group of people.
If they hadn’t succeeded so spectacularly with the 9/11 attacks, we would have gone on ignoring them.
lonbud - July 10, 2005 @ 1:30 am
My point is that if we continue to REACT to violence with violence, we ensure nothing but continuing violence. You can not kill all the terrorists, but you can stop giving them reasons to want to kill you.
Harper - July 10, 2005 @ 9:19 am
I agree. We cannot kill our way out of this. No matter how many “big bad guys” we take down, there will always be small groups capable of moving under the radar as these people did.
Michael Herdegen - July 14, 2005 @ 6:30 am
lonbud:
You are right, America could stop giving Islamic terrorists reasons to kill us, but it won’t be through small changes.
We would have to become islolationists, and also stop being the world’s most dynamic economy.
They aren’t just mad at us because we meddle in the Middle East, they’re angry because American culture is overwhelming traditional Arab culture,k and the only way to reverse that is to stop giving others in the world reasons to want to be like Americans.
Canadians are very much like Americans, but journalists in Iraq feel comfortable telling Iraqis that they’re Canadians. The difference is that nobody aspires to be Canadian, and therefore there’s no resentment among non-Canadians.