Yesterday it was revealed that the US has foiled 10 major terrorist attacks since 9-11. This includes 3 on US soil. Now let’s consider for a moment that this news comes years after the actual event, and the details are vague. This means the successes were secrets (or ant least not public knowledge) for many years, and considering how benign these attacks would have been, it kind of makes you think. First off what else has been stopped that we will never know about? Ok they use to raise and lower the threat alert weekly, and everyone made fun because nothing ever happened. What if that was because it stopped? Secrets suck. On one hand the intelligence and law enforcement community are fighting a winning a secret war against those who would seek to harm us. On the other it is a secret war so they never get credit for their work, instead person mock and question because they are unaware.
Ignorance truly is bliss. How I see it is there are the crazies and there are zealots. Crazies just snap one day and just start killing, but zealots are far worse since they aren’t crazy, but they want to kill. Because they are sane rational people who have fully dehumanized those they seek to destroy, they have patience, knowledge and resources to do it “right”. If Ossama Bin Laden was crazy he would already be dead, he would have lead the charge against a Marine Battalion in the early days of the Afghan war, and been mowed down. He and his commanders are zealots, who fight for glory and a reward, they are methodical, and can instill hatred into those who are expendable. Those that will strap an IED to themselves and walk into a police station and blow themselves up, are not zealots, they are young and stupid, which makes them expendable. A good commander never sends his best people to die, you send them to train others how to fight and die, or to identify and plan missions.
(Example in WWII Germany as the war turned against the Nazi’s they committed there best pilots to defending the home land, but America sent its best home to train the new pilots. Germany’s strategy meant that there were fewer and fewer experienced pilots to teach the new recruits as the war went on, so at first the America Air Corps was just better equipped, but as the war dragged on and the good pilots were shot down the America’s became both better trained and better equipped. Eventually the Nazi pilots were so poorly trained and the situation so desperate they ordered suicide missions since the men and planes weren’t coming back anyways, so they could at least take some Allies with them.)
The Japanese in WWII was different, for them (like the Islamic fundamentalists) to die for the cause was a good death, and one to be looked forward too. But throwing away men and machines is futile, if the foe will not be deterred. However, this gives use a model to use if we are to win our modern battle against fundamentalist forces. After the war we waged a PsyOps war to defeat traditional Japanese culture that made the mass use of suicide troops possible. We showed them their Emperor was not a god, and gave them work and something to look forward too. People with a future don’t blow themselves up; they work themselves to death to achieve their goals.
I have formally studied Middle Eastern tribal culture (finally a liberal arts class that wasn’t a waste of my time, unlike Latin) so this is more than a guess. To win in not just Iraq and Afghanistan, but in the whole Middle East, we first must go after the root causes of fundamentalism and the biggest is unemployment especially of young men. In some ME countries unemployment is >20%, and even higher in young men. If a man is unemployed and has no hope of finding work, he can’t get married, so he can’t have a family, so he has no future. Having lots of free time and no future is a breeding ground for terrorists. To be succinct to a 23 year old virgin, blaming the West for his troubles martyring himself solves a lot of problems, being dead solves the no future problem, but since his last act was “doing” something against the ones who caused this, he contributed (the families are given $30,000, which is like several million dollars here) and he will be remembered. Then there is his reward, he will go to paradise and get 72 pure women to serve him (to a guy who in life longed for the “company” of a woman, but had never even seen a woman’s knees, this is an excellent reward.)
My WWII examples are quite apt since in German after WWI the Jews were blamed for the crushing depression that enveloped a nation. The West buys oil and makes a very small fraction of the population very rich, while the common people remain very poor. Now teens and twenties boys are rebellious by nature so seeing the men who they should look to guidance corrupted by Western greed (the tribal leaders are the ones enriched by selling the oil from tribal lands) they turn to the next tier of leaders. In the ME the holy men are some of the strongest leaders, and they welcome the wayward youths. However, people don’t want to be told life isn’t fair, they want to be told that it is someone else’s fault. So they are told that their suffering and the corruption of their family (yes a tribe is often an extended family unit) is the fault of the West, and they eat the rhetoric up. Then alone comes the zealots, who want to “do” something about the evil West, and make great promises… You can see where this is going.
We fix it like we fixed the civil unrest in 1930’s America. We make jobs, we get the youth to help rebuilt their country. Thousands of young men off building roads or building for months at a time, in contact with Westerns, living in dorms, praying in Mosques with holy men who will preach a culturally appropriate version of America’s principle message “hard work and faith will overcome any obstacle, and make your country great.” This program will do more to reform the system over there than anything else. These young men will send money home while they work, go home with money in there pocket so they can get married and have a family, they will have be indoctrinated with a message that runs counter to fundamentalist principles, they will understand that Westerner’s aren’t demons, and if we are really good we can undermine the authority of tribal leadership, and show them that Democracy (actually Republicanism) and Capitalism are better. As the new culture spreads, and employment drops, we have achieved total victory, and built a stable country. Yes, this will cost a lot of money since we will have to almost bribe them to come as the control of the leadership will hard to break, and building a culturally acceptable pro-American message will be hard, since getting caught would be a bad thing. However, the price and effort will be well worth the cost, in the long run!
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