A More Mature Response to 9-11

[jordan179]

Some people have argued that we should have simply tried to deal with Al Qaeda through "police work" -- arresting terrorists when we found them, and not attacking Afghanistan. And certainly not Iraq. So I'm going to speculate how this would have worked.

Comments

[kitten_goddess]

OK, Jordan, question time.

Why would this give the government cart blanche to wiretap innocent Americans without court orders, conduct warrantless searches without cause, and go through patrons' library borrowing records? The Patriot Act, I think, is nothing more than a cynical ploy to grab power.

[jordan179]

Why would this give the government cart blanche to wiretap innocent Americans without court orders, conduct warrantless searches without cause, and go through patrons' library borrowing records? The Patriot Act, I think, is nothing more than a cynical ploy to grab power.

Well, the wiretapping is to catch terrorists communicating with other terrorists abroad. The streamlined-warrant process is to catch them before they can attack, or destroy evidence. The library-book thing is just arrogation of power in a crisis.

[headnoises]

A question-
Other than police trying to establish if that funky conversation they listened into last week between Known Terrorist #523432 and Random Person in the US, what the FRICK would anyone want with library records?

And why would folks be upset with folks seeing them?

I can understand if you've got a two a week Harlequin Romance addiction, a little...but....

[jordan179]

As I said, I think the library-records thing is just arrogation of power.

I think the fear of having one's library records read is pretty much paranoia.

[bull]

I saw you were a friend of justgoto I've added you.

[headnoises]

My Elfie demands that I add his solution:
Glass the middle east (Israel doesn't count) and give France to Germany.

Poof! World Peace!

[foomf]

You and your commentators are mistaking a terrorist group with a legitimate army

[jordan179]

You are assuming that these are inviolable categories. But when a state allows a terrorist organization to base off its soil and attack another state, that first state is committing an act of war against the second state, and the second state may legitimately undertake warlike actions against the first state in reprisal and self-defense. Furthermore, when a state shelters terrorists, "counter-terror agencies" are fairly useless against those terrorists, since the authorities in the area are protecting the terrorists. The Terrorist State (term for a state which shelters international terrorists) must first be defeated in war and thus its protection peeled away, before the terrorists hiding behind that state can be defeated.

[foomf]

Two responses, not sure if you edited or just replied twice, but I appreciate the thoughtful responses

[jordan179]

The problem is that simply attacking governments is not any effective answer either, as you well know, because "peeling away" the protection requires "peeling away" the entrenching government, or at least, those powerful persons in the governments who are supportive or at least not hostile to the terrorist agencies. Too fast, you get another Iraq, too slow, you get nowhere AND you increase the pool of potential terrorists everywhere else.

The evidence is very strong that not only has the Iraq campaign not increased "the pool of potential terrorists everywhere else," but that it has actually attracted potential terrorists from places such as Arabia and Europe into Iraq, where they could be conveniently sent to their proper fate of feeding the worms. Had they not gone into Iraq to scream and leap against humans ready to gun them down, they would have remained alive and able to hurt humans less able to fight back. It has, in short, drained the pool, as Al Qaeda has now discovered and more or less admitted.

We did not defeat Libya "in