From: Ramez Naam (mez@apexnano.com)
Date: Thu Jun 05 2003 - 15:24:15 MDT
(Please pardon the poor formatting in my mails this afternoon. I'm
using a not-so-great web client at the moment.)
mez wrote:
The real question is, would their task have been significantly harder
without the facilities in Afghanistan? I doubt it.
John Clark replied:
Do you? I don't. Even if you're a crazy fundamentalist you are not
going to crash an airliner into a skyscraper just because I say so
unless you are convinced my plan will work and am some sort of a
superior human being who should be followed. To do that I need to
isolate you from the rest of the world and indoctrinate you, and to do
that I need at least one secure base, and to do that I need state
support. They didn't go to Afghanistan to get a tan I can tell you
that.
mez:
Aum Sriyinko executed attacks intended to be on the same scale as 9/11
or even larger. They had no state support. They operated inside of
Japan. Only the fact that chemical weapons are actually rather hard
to use saved thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of lives.
Other terrorists and groups both small and large do just fine without
a state sponsor. Consider Timothy McVeigh, the IRA, various Basque
separatist groups, and others.
John Clark:
making nice to Islam will not reduce their anger one iota because the
root cause of that anger was not any specific action committed by the
west. They are angry at us for what we are not what we did. They would
be less angry if the foundation of the west was some dogma, even some
dogma they didn't like,
instead it is based on free markets and pragmatic problem solving and
that frightens and angers them.
mez:
I disagree. If you offer just about anyone in the middle east a
one-way ticket to the US, they'll snap it up. Everyone knows life
here is better. The want that better life for themselves.
Their anger comes from their poverty (relative to us), their despair
(lack of future opportunities), the oppression of their governments
(supported or installed by the US), their feeling of having been
humiliated by the west, and their indoctrination into fundamentalist
religion.
A real plan on terrorism would target these root causes by spreading
affluence, freedom, and opportunity.
John Clark:
Sure all that anger is dangerous and needs to be defused, I'm not sure
what will work but I am sure what won't work, starting a be kind to
terrorists policy will not work.
mez:
By all means go after terrorists. They should be caught and their
threat should be removed.
What I'm concerned about are not the terrorists who exist today. It's
the /future terrorists/ that concern me. The future terrorists will
have weapons that can do far more damage than any terrorist attack
we've yet seen.
I support actions to protect us against the terrorists of today. I
just think it's even more important to forestall the creation of a
future generation of terrorists. Where those two priorities conflict
I place a priority on the future.
I'd rather have another 10 September 11ths than just one nuclear
terrorist attack, or one bioweapon attack using the biotech of 2030.
So for me it all comes back to spreading democracy and affluence.
IMHO, that should be the US's #1 priority in foreign policy.
Hopefully it will work in Iraq and Afghanistan. But so far I'm not
convinced.
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