How to Win Against Terrorists? Don't Fight a War

Fighting terrorism with justice "What is remarkable is how American policy-makers have refused to learn from the historical experiences of Great Britain, a country that faced terror threats for decades in Northern Ireland, from no surrender zealots motivated by religious and nationalist fervor. In the case of the IRA, several hundred terrorists were organized after 1978 into secret cells that could wage terror pretty much indefinitely. The IRA was embedded within a global terror network that included Marxist guerrillas in South America, ETA in Spain and foreign governments, such as Libya. Not so different from al Qaeda.

Even a passing familiarity with the history of Northern Ireland would provide us with pointers on how not to deal with Islamist terrorists. First, between 1761 and 1972 the British government passed 26 legislative acts containing features designed to combat Irish nationalists, including measures seen in the US Patriot Act such as detention without trial and the suspension of habeas corpus. In the 1970s, the war model led British security services to use harsh interrogation techniques such as hooding, subjecting suspects to loud noises, sleep deprivation, prolonged standing, slaps to the face and slow starvation of detainees. When this severe ill treatment eventually [as it always does] becomes public knowledge, it undermined the legitimacy of government counter-terror policies, and created new constituencies of sympathizers in Northern Ireland. Repressive British government policy in the 1970s-from massacre of 'Bloody Sunday' to the internment of terror suspects without trial and a 'shoot-to-kill' policy in the 1980s, opened up a wellspring of support for a militaristic and Marxist-inspired IRA, which may not have existed otherwise.

In the end, it was only in the 1980s, late 1980's, when the British government moved from a 'war on terror' model to a law enforcement model that it began to win the struggle against Irish nationalist terror groups."

A BBC article supports this: "...the most recent example happened in 1971, when the British Government introduced the internment of hundreds of republican suspects in an attempt to shut down the IRA. The tactic was abandoned four years later and is thought to have increased support for the IRA."

See previous post from 2002, "Using the American model to solve all acts of terrorism".

Free America

Listening to the radio again (mp3 here). This time it was about Alfred McCoy's article called 'Outcast of Camp Echo: The Punishment of David Hicks' (magazine website here) with overtones of "The President Versus David Hicks" and mind control.

The second interview was with Bobby Kennedy Jr about his Rolling Stone article "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" (moby mirror). The implication is that if the result was in a country like Ukraine or Georgia then the result would've been overturned.

More Gore

A few years ago I tried to imagine what would have happened if Al Gore hadn't won the 2000 election. Well now that we're half way through his second term you can only wonder what kind of problems would've occurred if he hadn't turned solving global warming into the Apollo project of the 21st century. Although his critiques have labeled it a quagmire I guess it's better than half the world becoming so.

Update: In the comments Paul pointed to an introduction to Saturday Night Live introduction by president Gore (the direct link didn't work but this one did).

Update 2: Lawrence Lessig links to two adverts that are surely directed by Paul Verhoeven (from Robocop or Starship Troopers).

Richard Dawkins on the War

Bin Laden's victory "Whatever anyone may say about weapons of mass destruction, or about Saddam's savage brutality to his own people, the reason Bush can now get away with his war is that a sufficient number of Americans, including, apparently, Bush himself, see it as revenge for 9/11. This is worse than bizarre. It is pure racism and/or religious prejudice. Nobody has made even a faintly plausible case that Iraq had anything to do with the atrocity. It was Arabs that hit the World Trade Centre, right? So let's go and kick Arab ass. Those 9/11 terrorists were Muslims, right? And Eye-raqis are Muslims, right? That does it. We're gonna go in there and show them some hardware. Shock and awe? You bet. "

"Saddam Hussein has been a catastrophe for Iraq, but he never posed a threat outside his immediate neighbourhood. George Bush is a catastrophe for the world. And a dream for Bin Laden."

This is so dripping with vitriol. Richard Dawkins has previously written about how religion has caused so many of the world's problems and now he points out that American democracy may also be to blame.

Wrong

I was watching this thing on TV. It's sort of like a book I read that considered what the world would be like if Hitler had won the war, or Sliders or something. Interestingly, it posed the question: "What would happen if Bush won the 2000 election?". Jeez, that would just be wrong. It's lucky that Gore won.

What would he have done then? Maybe he would have moved away from politics and into IT (hasn't that taken off - Wired was so right). Maybe he'd join Apple's board. Nah, that's just ridiculous.