What is the Answer to Terrorism?

The answer that I haven seen proposed most often by politicians, civilians, and the media is Revenge – 'nuke them back into the Stone Age' and all that.

For every attack, we will respond. If they take one of ours, we'll take ten of theirs, and we will keep doing so until they're too afraid of us to take any more.

The only question is: which side is saying that?

Answer: both.

And so you end up with the endless cycle of revenge, swirling around and around, destroying everyone.

So what is the answer? How do you stop the cycle of revenge? The cheap answer is don't start it. But once it has started, that is, of course, no answer. So, what then?

It's actually not that hard. We already know the answer. Every single one of us, though maybe we've forgotten.

It's called the Law.

People seem to have forgotten that the system of European Law rose up as answer to a system of honor-based tradition that revolved around revenge. The first laws were put into place not to form a legal system based on the extraction of wealth from various peoples, but to stop the endless cycle of family and local feuds.

Those laws established a price for every wrong, including the taking of a life, with the idea being that if the price was paid then justice had been served, and the wronged family was then no longer honor-bound to exact vengeance.

The Law wasn't meant to be fair, or just, or satisfying; it was meant to build Civil Order. And that is what it did.

It took a long time for the idea of those laws to take hold – hundreds of years. And, really, they were famous family feuds still running right up to this century. But essentially the system of laws put a cap on the running violence of that time.

Nothing has changed today. If you want to Keep the Peace, then you use police, Constitutional law, and the courts. If you want an endless cycle of violence revolving around vengeance, then you use Revenge.

It's the tougher choice. The far less satisfying choice. And we keep trying to wreck our own system of Constitutional Law by establishing laws that eke out some kind of just revenge for that very reason. But it is also the only choice currently known that brings Peace.

That is an old lesson, a lesson so old that there are Fairy Stories about it. But the romance of Revenge is so much more enticing and immediately satisfying that people forcefully try to forget this lesson, and so go back to fighting Revenge with Revenge.

Crisis of Finance

In case you hadn't heard, this isn't the first time financiers have crashed an economy. It isn't even the tenth. From the Japanese crisis to the Argentine crisis to the S&L scandal to the City crisis to the Great Depression to the Long Depression, they've had a hand in causing them all – meaning, today's crisis, despite what some people keep saying, isn't an abnormal state of affairs. No, this is what they do.

Previous to the Great Depression, banks failed all of the time. And when they failed, depositors lost everything. There were no guarantees.

"Bankster" is not at all a new word. It required a bit of dusting off before it was recently brought back into vogue, but it's been around a very long time.

And not just because of people losing all of their deposited savings. There were the usurious loans, the calling in of debts in moments of bank crisis, and the confiscation of property through repossession.

On top of that, the financiers repeatedly would crash the economy – repeatedly and heavily. So regularly, in fact, that it was given a term – the Boom & Bust Cycle. Because when it was booming (blowing up the balloon) it boomed big, and when it busted it busted to nothing.

And that's how things were.

But, the Long Depression followed so soon after by the Great Depression changed everything. Regulations were put into place denying banks and finance houses the ability to implement the more "creative" investment vehicles which had precipitated so many crises. Bank accounts were insured, so that depositors no longer stood to lose everything. And banks were organized around a federal institution, standing ready to bail them out when they messed up, ready to do so that another "banking crisis" did not arise.

And added to that was a mentality of "safety and security" that pervaded the time. So, for a generation there was stability.

But stability bred complacency. The financiers convinced enough people that they were better now, wiser, with enough internal safeguards that they would no longer repeat the crises of the past.

That notion mixed easily and headily with the neo-liberal belief that the financiers understood finance far better than any government could, and therefore the financiers should be allowed to run their businesses as they, being the most fittest, thought best. Essentially declaring that the financiers needed a free hand so that they could make everyone a lot more money.

So, after thirty years of safety, the government began stripping away the regulations, and the financiers immediately started exploding bubble economies again, with the inevitably resultant bank failures and government bailouts. The first of these to be seriously noticed (but by far not the first) being the S&L Crisis.

Why?

Because it's what they do.

All of the various new investment vehicles aren't actually "new." They're old, warmed over rehashes from the pre-Depression days brought to the modern era. All the old financier favorites, everything they wanted brought back from the "good old days."

And with them came the Boom and Bust Cycle.

It was inevitable. After all, if you set out to return to a Victorian-style economic regulatory system, then you get a Victorian-style economy.

Right now, we're in the Bust, and it's sad and trying and entirely predictable.

We Don't Know Why We're in Iraq? ...Really?

Shockingly enough, I still keep seeing people from even the major news media and political figures declaring that we don't know why we are in Iraq, or that it was all a mistake, and that maybe Afghanistan was justified, but that's hard to explain too.

But it's not. None of that is true.

Maybe we could get by without the politicians knowing or understanding the major events of the day – after all, they're politicians, not civil servants. Though, it can (and should) be argued that we'd all be better off if they did know.

However, it is disturbing that the news outfits don't understand. They've had ten years to wrap their heads around it now, and that is their job, after all.

Worse, though, even though they don't understand, and state that they don't understand, they then try to explain those events to the public. Whether they are informing, justifying, or insinuating, it doesn't matter – if they don't understand, then they can't explain. That's just a given.

(Of course, their statements that they don't understand might just be another marketing or political ploy – they are a business, after all. But that's a question for another day.)

So, I'll lay it out, here and now. That way it's there for everyone. And it might also provide a brief primer on how to listen to politicians.

Of our stated reasons and justifications for going to war with Afghanistan and Iraq, and they were many and ever-changing, only one was stated every time. Only one was stated from the first press release to the public all the way to the opening of conflict and on past the first battles to the initial postulations of opening up a wider front (which eventually collapsed when the first two conflicts dragged on past their initial political timetables).

Only one reason. And in political speak, the language of politicians, that means that was the reason.

So what it? The reason that is the true reason for the US being there – A radical transformation of the Middle East.

The concept, in case you missed it, was to “drain the global swamp.” In other worlds, to end the threat of terrorism, the US was going to remake the world, or at least those parts that its leaders didn't like. Iraq was just first. Iraq was to be used as a staging ground for invading other countries of the Middle East – Syria, Lebanon, and Iran were being kicked around in the press in the glory-filled days after first conquest. And it wasn't to have stopped there, but was to have continued on until all of the Middle East was made Democratic, Capitalist, Middle Class, and safe.

It was audacious, radical, even daring (which politicians don't usually like to be). And it could never, ever have worked.

Why not?

1. Because it was also blindingly, glaringly, horrifically unsound strategy. The military stated it from the beginning – you would need hundreds of thousands of troops to seize and then SECURE a single country. Not tens of thousands. Not thousands, such as the US attempted. Hundreds of thousands. Less can CONQUER, but it cannot SECURE. For this plan to have succeeded even with the two countries already conquered, much less the stated grand plan, there would have had to have been one of three things: a draft, a large alliance, or a radical system of violent control. America wasn't prepared to commit to any of those, so the whole affair was doomed from the start. But any general who stated so was summarily fired, until no one left spoke up anymore. Only someone completely pie-eyed would start a military operation by firing all the military leaders until you were left with only yes-men.

2. People don't like to be conquered. It doesn't where in the world you go, that stays a fact. Sure, a lot of nations would rather their leader weren't forced on them, and wouldn't mind if they (s)he were deposed for them, as long as deposing is the only "aid" the foreign nations were going to give. But that's never all, as the people of Iraq and Afghanistan so rightly anticipated. There were strings. America wanted a say, an equal say, a more-than equal say actually, in the governments that were to organized after those deposings. After all, America was the one who deposed them, so it was only fitting that they should have that say.

3. With America wanting to guarantee long-term stability in its conquered nations – or pacify its colonies, to give this the old Roman Imperial-style taste it has earned – America had the need of staying in these nations for at the least a hundred years. That's how long pacification takes. But America is a democracy, even if a Republic-style Democracy, and a Democracies citizens tend to become increasingly irate when wars last longer than a few years, particularly when the blood and loot aren't equalishly distributed. America was never going to stand around for the hundred years necessary to pacify its conquests.

4. Democracy is not Freedom. I can't emphasize this enough. Yes, the two often are together. Yes, the two often work well together. But Democracy does NOT NOT NOT produce freedom. In a Democracy, one half of the population plus one can commit the other half to slavery. What produces freedom? Constitutional law. You can't go into a country, hand them the ability to vote, and expect radical change. Voting makes a nice photo-op, but it doesn't change any of the fundamental of a society.

5. And the reason, most of all, democratic nations also commit terrorism. To prove, one need go no further than Ireland and Northern Britain, where two democratic nations have been committing acts of terrorism against each other for generations now, but I will. Consider all of those nations of South America and Central America, where terrorism ruled for five decades. Or all of those nations of Eastern Europe, where the US so recently fought a war in Bosnia, where inter-tribal acts of terrorism have been going on for centuries. Making a country democratic doesn't stop terrorism; it just and only gives that people the right to vote. They could even vote to all be terrorists. Which means that the central premise of the entire affair was deeply, atrociously, abominably wrong.

The whole concept was based on false assumptions, blind belief, and naked hubris. And every step of the way only layered on the arrogantly ignorant stupidity.

But what is done can't be undone, and no one wants to be the one to abandon the wars and then have another terrorist attack happen. Even if the two events were in NO way related, they would still be associated in everyone's minds, and everyone would forever wonder if….

And on top of that, leaving now would essentially assign a victory to terrorists, because even though the terrorist enemies of the US aren't much involved in either war, the US has made both wars "about" terrorism, which thus, by our own doing, would give those terrorist the victory. A victory they had no real part in earning.

And on top of all that, also has the possibility of emboldening other nations currently under US sway to revolt, having seen these two nations successfully fight off US hegemony.

That’s why we're still there.