11-14-2015, 04:01 AM -
(11-14-2015, 03:50 AM)shaun.lawson Wrote: No. There has to be effective retribution.
What's the first rule of conflict? Don't do what the enemy wants you to do. So there you are, demanding we do EXACTLY what the enemy wants us to do - all for the sake of "doing something". But in a conflict as complex as this, doing nothing is infinitely preferable to doing something... until we've worked out, carefully and calmly, what that something involves.
The enemy would like nothing more - nothing more on Earth - than for us to pile into Syria, send in ground forces, and recruit, by the bucketload, yet more terrorists for them. The enemy would like nothing more than to turn the whole of Europe and the Middle East into a raging inferno: which as it isn't a conventional army, would involve constant violence, community turning on community, fear and loathing leading to more fear and loathing. An eye for an eye? Everyone ends up blind.
How do we resolve this? This is a generational conflict, the like of which we've never known before - so we do so over the very, very long term through our ideas, our values, our tolerance and our decency. We do so by never, ever, ever turning against those who these bastards claim to represent when they absolutely do not. We drain the swamp of tacit support for extremists by demonstrating every day of every year what our values involve: that we don't judge, we don't discriminate, that anyone has a chance in our society.
We do so by pooling intelligence across the world and cracking down as hard as possible on anyone with any links to these lunatics: but even then, through due process. Not by sacrificing the very thing that makes our society decent in the first place. We do so by ending the madness of freedom of movement throughout Europe: nation states must have control of their borders to secure and protect their people. We do so by banging heads together across the major Middle East states and facilitating, somehow, a political solution. Military solutions never last in the Middle East; only a political solution, brokered by Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, can.
And the likes of you or I? The chances of any of this touching us are infitesimally small. Be grateful for what you have and the era you live in: the time of total war, everyone killing everyone for Queen and Country, is long, long gone. So we, like everyone else, just get on with life. Keep calm and carry on: because there's nothing that reduces terrorists to helpless impotence more than that very thing.
Well said Shaun.
PS Let's also lobby the Saudis like fuck to crack down on the corrupt bastards who are funding these nutjobs.