raVeneyes said:
I think we could have used the tactics I've talked about to avoid a war while still retaliating.
BigMacing a culture to death is a clearly valuable and effective tactic. Look at the whole backlash world wide to the export of US culture. Look at Saudi Arabia. Look at Egypt. Look at Kuwait. These are all muslim countries that are very loyal to the American way of life and have very little objection to the things that we do.
The internet, the banks, I'm talking about propaganda and money control.
The US controls more of the world's money supply and international trade than any other country in the world. We have influence over key banks and trade organizations capable of completely shutting down the money flow of any person or entity we see fit. If we really wanted to we could return the middle east to the stone age by simply cutting off the money flow to them. Al Quieda has clearly been hamstrung by our control over their money flow, and we could go even further.
The internet is the most valuable propaganda resource EVER! The world today has been trained in to believing anything they see in print as fact. The internet is primarily the worlds most widely distributed free print publication....I'm willing to bet more people have access to the internet than those that have access to the Bible which is the world's best selling book. Placing sites in to the hands of key people in terrorist organizations...slowly and marginally altering sites with hacking attacks that belong to terrorist organizations...distributing propaganda in waves and getting people in terrorist organizations to question themselves.
The internet is also a valuable tool for tracking and spying. Terrorist organizations use it as a communication tool, and no matter how good someone is at hiding their tracks on the internet, there is no 100% way to hide where information came from (otherwise there would be no way to send back information to them).
If we took the brainy road while they take the brutish road it will lead to a victory. Yes they blew up a building...we leveled two entire countries in response. Now the war begins in ernest, and rather than give terrorist organizations rallying points by blowing up more things ourselves, we should be more subtle.
I hardly know where to begin.
Re-read your first paragraph. Are you for or against Western culture? I can't tell. In any event, Western culture is what the Islamic extremists OBJECT to, so exporting more of it isn't going to help. You cite countries like Saudi Arabia as emulating Western culture. Do you realize those countries have problems with Islamic terrorists as well? Did you notice what happened in Jordan the other day?
As for the Banking world, no, the USA cannot just shut off money to other countries. We can track terrorist activities through the financial systems, and use it as an investigative tool. In fact, we have, and we are. Much of what we know of the September 11 hijackers came from reconstructing their bank records prior to September 11. But do you realize that a lot of money in the Arab world is outside the banking system altogether? Alternate money movement systems, called Hawalas, are widely used in the Islamic world, both in and outside the Middle East.
Your comments on the internet fall primarily in the category of "So what?" If they all have internet access now, as you assert, it doesn't appear to have been too effective in stopping, say, suicide bombers. The real problem in the Islamic extremist world is that most of the news (read: indoctrination) comes from radical clerics preaching hatred of the West from within the Mosque walls. This is an enormous problem in Europe in particular, where everyone has access to the Internet. So I guess showing them Google hasn't helped; they still want to kill the infidels. Even the Liberal ones.
The statement that we leveled two countries is irresponsible and displays only your bias. I presume you're referring to Afghanistan and Iraq. Both those countries were not "leveled" and in fact the infrastructures there are in better shape and work better since we've been there.
You imagine you're offering some wiser solution here, but in fact you've just listed things we're already doing. And we already know how ineffective NOT using the military to respond to terrorism is, because we had an eight year test of that theory, called the Clinton administration.
