Quote:
Originally posted by prb
They strike us, we strike back. Strikes to continue on both sides indefinitely. This sounds like the situation in Israel, doesn't it?
The only way to stop the cycle of terror is to convince those who would employ terror that there is no good reason to target us. If the United States was perceived as trying to help solve the Palestinian problem instead of trying to exploit it, that would certainly help. We are fighting terrorism, but not the root causes of terrorism.
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There needs to be a short
and long term strategy in combination.
In your scenario, what is done in the short term until we can "convince" the terrorists that we're ok? Probably not much right? That means we will be subjected to whatever attacks they desire until their perceptions change.
We need to buy breathing room by attacking those terrorists who have the capability of striking us now and those that will have that capability in the near future. In the long term, we need to change their perceptions. This is precisely what destroying Al Qaeda and the Taliban and rebuilding Iraq into a viable economy/country does for us. It puts terrorist organizations on their heels for a short time while we develop the tools to change perceptions of us.