Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
I understand. The whole concept of using a military force to combat an enemy whose force is only barely of military scope long enough to mount one attack, and the rest of the time is of paramilitary scope at best, is ridiculous. It's the old metaphor of using a hand grenade to kill a spider.Who would he declare war on? That's the problem with the whole idea of a "war on terror".
Espionage seems like a far better tactic for fighting terrorism. All these experts who have been quoted at length here have some very deep insights into the psychology of terrorists. You'd think a government with five million employees could figure out a way to infiltrate them and use psychology to distract, reform or defeat them.
Just the single revelation from interviews with reformed terrorists, that the overwhelming majority of them came home because their mothers wanted them to, says a lot. Let's infiltrate the terrorist cells and give them and their Moms all iPhones!
Indeed. Besides, as comedians (some of the world's brightest people) point out all the time: Every time we declare war on something, we get more of it. Just look at poverty and drugs!Personally, I think it is wrong to characterise the fight against Al Qaeda as a war at all. The fight against the Taliban is closer to being a war, but the Taliban represents no State so it's still problematic.
Fortunately, the U.S. has a Constitution and everybody--the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, and the people themselves--is bound by it. The President must do only what the Constitution empowers him to do, not what we tell him to do in our e-mails.And if these conflicts are not regarded as wars, the next question is: how far does the President's authority to authorise such actions extend? My impression is that the general feeling in the US is that the President has a wide discretion in such things.
Unfortunately the President, Congress and the Supreme Court have been using the Constitution for toilet paper since 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt came into power and was looking for something to wipe his butt with as he began turning our country into a socialist worker's paradise.
I prefer to regard it as a linguistic error, which can be corrected.This is another example of silly trolling by SAM that diminishes her argument. It's quite deliberate.
I understand. I'm not arguing that. I'm just assuring her that our drones really are trying to kill the people our government has identified as terrorists, not the schoolchildren next door.The problem for SAM is that your "carefully identified terrorist" is not a terrorist at all in her eyes. She doesn't trust the US government's labelling of these targets as terrorists. Probably, in her increasingly radicalised state of mind, she regards anybody fighting the US as a freedom fighter.
If she objects to the killing of innocents then she has a problem with the accuracy of our government's intelligence, its targeting software, and perhaps also with its tolerance levels for collateral damage. But if she objects to the killing of people our government identifies as terrorists, then she objects to violence as an acceptable way to resolve disputes, and I have absolutely no disagreement with her.
So long as she tries just as hard to pacify the strategy of her people, the Muslims, as I try to pacify the strategy of my people, the Americans.
Deal?