Posted by
Curt Day on Friday, November 03, 2006 4:19:46 PM
If anything reflects the philosophy of the Bush Administrators, and many of his supporters, in how he fights terror, it is the "Shock And Awe" attack on Iraq. It seemed, back in 2003, that Bush's analysis of Iraq saw only two distinct groups of people: those looking for liberation and those who would resist. Our eliminating Saddam would enlist those Iraqis looking for liberation to the American view of the world while the lightening and thunder of our military strikes would overwhelm any thought of resistance from all other Iraqis. Considering that most Iraqis not only want us to leave, they also approve of attacks against our troops; both assessments appear to be wrong. We could also add that the number of both terrorist recruits and attacks have increased.
Thus our nation must change from using Bush's current strategy of using "Shock and Awe" to defeat the terrorists. Perhaps a better model of thought in understanding our current predicament would be to apply what we know about abuse to our attempts to defeat terrorism. After all, terrorism can be accurately described as an extreme abuse. In addition, on a smaller scale, abuse terrorizes its victims.
A couple of leading causes of abuse is past abuse and the witnessing of condoned violence. If these factors contribute to the emergence of terrorism, then the overuse or indiscriminatory use of force, while possibly quelling current violence, will in the end be counterproductive. If what we know about abuse applies to terrorism, then we should realize that much of the violence we use to defeat the terrorists will only come back to haunt us. Certainly we need to stop those who are bent on using terrorism. But we must do so using as little force as possible.
This different approach does not imply that we should never use force in combating terrorism. But it does tell us of the tradeoffs of using force so that our use of force to combat terrorism should be done with caution and with precision. The misuse of force will only succeed at providing job security for those wielding such force because it will forever create a market that demands their services.