The geopolitical truth about terrorism [Archives:2004/779/Opinion]

By Joseph Hrevnack
[email protected]
For the Yemen Times
Terrorism is a tool. It is not something that is a tangible entity and so therefore one cannot wage a conventional war against it. By doing so, it enables the people in power to fight a war for whatever reason they choose to with the outward appearance of moral justification to the general population. This is so because of the harsh connotations associated with terrorism and the fear it invokes in people. By playing off of people's fears it is letting terrorists win and by fighting a conventional war it makes the conditions that produce terror in the first place more prevalent. This is a vicious cycle and it must be broken somehow.
The fact is that if a group of people want to kill others, they can. A rogue act by an individual or a few people against others cannot be stopped. Think about it: if you wanted to perform an act of violence on your fellow man couldn't you do it if you really wanted too? The only way you could stop events like this would be to live under a totalitarian rule where the very rights you hold to be self evident are put on the back burner for security. Even then, you would still have the occasional wing-nut or two slip through the cracks of the system. The way you fight terrorism is by making the underlying motivations for it null and void. You do this through the principles of what made this country great to begin with, egalitarian compromise and open debate. This is the complete anti-thesis of how this “War on Terror” is being fought and it almost seems intentionally so.
Terrorists do not fight because they hate our freedom or for any other jingoistic factor. The reason why they attack us or other groups of people is because they have a political agenda whose needs are not being met. People are inherently good, including terrorists, and will not fight unless they have a legitimate reason to do so. This is just human nature. Usually when a group resorts to violence it is because one or more of their basic human rights are being violated. This is universally true in almost all instances of terror, all one has to do to understand this is to try to be objective and put themselves in the other person's shoes and ask themselves what they would do if they were in that situation.
I do not ask these difficult questions with a motivation to try to justify terror. I only ask these questions to try to get people to understand the root causes of terror, and to make an effort to try to rid the world of them. People will not fight if they have decent paying jobs and are not poor. People will not fight if they have food in their stomachs. People will not fight if they have an opportunity for social advancement. People will not fight if they have an education. People will not fight if they have a decent environment to raise a family. People will not fight if their land is not forcefully taken from them. And people will not fight if their land is not under constant occupation.
So making these conditions manifest in the world is the real way you fight terror. By doing what we are doing in this country it will only make these conditions worse and it will only increase terror for years to come. We are losing this war because we are going about fighting it in the wrong way and we are less safe three years after 9-11 for doing it. What kind of a world will our children have if the people currently in power have their way by waging a hundred year war on terror? Will it be a world worth living in?
In summary, the way that we are fighting terrorism is wrong. It is in fact making the world a less safe place to live in. The only way to stop terrorism by a conventional war would be to take away the basic human rights that we Americans hold dear to the point that it would be a complete contradiction to the very principles this country was founded upon. The real way you fight terror is to cure the underlining causes by wiping out poverty and hunger. A global redistribution of wealth is called for and it is the only way this world will last and get past the Dark Age that it has currently found itself in.
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