Zombie Patriots and other musings

[John Kelsey]

At 12:34 PM 12/14/03 -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>At 11:52 AM 12/13/03 -0500, John Kelsey wrote:

...
> >One interesting property of the lone warriors is that they can't
> >actually make peace.
>
>Good points, but not entirely true.  For instance, we could stop the
>Jihad (tm) (including future Jihads by other parties) by stopping all 
>foreign aid,
>following the good general's advice, "Trade with all, make treaties with 
>none, and
>beware of foreign entanglements."

So, I think that's pretty sound advice, but I don't think any of the top 
ten reasons for supporting it involve whether Al Qaida will stop attacking 
us.  Maybe they will, maybe they won't, but our foreign policy ought to be 
made based on what is in our long-term best interest ("our" meaning 
American citizens); realistically, terrorist attacks are a fairly small 
part of that calculation.  For example, we could presumably beat China in a 
war, but such a war would be enormously more expensive and dangerous than 
fighting Al Qaida.  If continuing to play world's policeman improves our 
chances of avoiding war with China, at the cost of bringing about some 
attacks from Al Qaida, that's a win for us.

Now, I suspect that playing world's policeman does *not* make us less 
likely to get into really dangerous and expensive war, and often gets us 
caught up in little wars that could expand into bigger ones.  (The Korean 
war apparently came relatively close to getting us into a war with China, 
for example.)  But there's at least some argument to be made about 
that--for example, by ensuring the security of Japan and Germany, we have 
avoided having two potentially very well-armed and dangerous opponents 
wandering around, possibly going on an empire-building spree that would 
have forced us into a nuclear war with them sooner or later.

...
> >Of course, there's a more fundamental problem with surrendering to the
> >lone warriors.  Imagine that there's such a wave of pro-life terrorism that
> >we finally agree to ban abortion.  You're a fanatically committed
> >pro-choice activist.  What's your next move?
>
>Rudolph bombed clinics, not random people because the govt allowed the
>clinics.  Contrast with a distributed jihad which attacks citizens to
>sway a govt.

Isn't he alleged to have also done the Olympic Park bombing?  (Who knows 
whether he really did, or whether the FBI just assumed he had so they'd 
only have one domestic terrorist at large.)

Anyway, my point is that it's never going to be acceptable for the US 
government to pull out of making decisions about policy within the US.  A 
campaign of terrorism against abortion clinics, or against liquor stores, 
or against bookstores, can't be responded to by changes in policy to 
appease the terrorists without giving up on any kind of a free society.


--John Kelsey, kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com
PGP: FA48 3237 9AD5 30AC EEDD  BBC8 2A80 6948 4CAA F259