Originally posted by: DealMonkey
Why would invading Iraq ever reduce terrorism? I don't get it...
Because the people who we are realy fighting against are not realy the people most people envision.
These people (not the populations) are fanatical about their own power. The leaders are rich and well educated. They are not freedom fighters or people pissed off about the injustices that the west has wroght on their country, they are people that actually spent a great deal of time in the west and lots of them actually attented higher level colleges here in the United States. They were able to afford this because they are rich, born rich and powerfull and they want it to stay that way.
They use the oil to keep themselves rich and exploit the populations under them and do there best to keep them in a 15th century mentality. A undeducated goat hearder is a much easier person to control and use then if he could leave the country at will and get educated and be able to afford technologies that make it easy to improve their lives.
However you have the side effect of creating a great deal of suffering for your people by exploiting them so thouroghly. They want answers and in actuality they are quite powerfull and could overthrough their own countries easily if they realised what was going on.
So the rulers make certain that from the day that they are born that they are told that all there problems originate from the west in areas like Isreal, Europe, and America. They are then able to recruite some young and gulible people (before they get to old to figure out what is going on and get jaded to the whole thing) to do terrorist happenings to keep the publicity alive and make it look like its a big struggle.
A sort of middle eastern version of "wag the dog".
You see terrorism was popular in Isreal for a while. Isreal had very draconion gun laws inherited from the british and terrorists knew that they could walk into any public place and gun people down and nobody could do anything about it. This was until Isreal removed the laws and encouraged the populations to carry effective weapons. Then when ever terrorist would show up at a public place they would be killed/or disarmed in short order. Isreal then used ex-terrorists to track down their leaders and assinate them. For a while it work and terrorism actually died down quite a bit.
(one thing that people don't realise is that arab people are welcome and actually hold high elected offices in the government their. In political races the arabic vote is followed and is considured quite important to the outcomes)
But eventually they hit on the idea of "suicide bombers" and the whole 17 virgins bit. Then they young idiots would just blow themselves up or get gunned down immediately and their wouldn't be any way to track them back to the leaders that are financing them. All the evidence was then a mushy pile of red ooze.
That's why invading Iraq is going to lower terrorism. Before wars ever since the civil war wars were "total". Entire populations would fight each other. But now when we go to war we go after the leaders first. Now that they understand that they can't hide behind populations, and their natural cowardance is showing up. Ever notice how we are getting a lot more cooraperation from the surrounding governments? It make it easer to route out the hardcore guys if the local governments don't actively support them.
In the 50-60's we tried assination to fight these guys, but we couldn't tell if the guy replacing them would be worse. Now everybody thinks were serious because they think we won't just take out the leader, but all the people who would be able to replace him.
(As far as korea goes, they are just bluster. They do this crap every few years just to hear themselves yell. After all they can't realy piss us off to much or we'd pull the plug on the billions and billions of dollars in food aid we give them every year. There goes the "million man" army.)
As far as the local populations go, I think that they realy don't care. In there mind at worst they would be just exchanging one group of exploiting government people for another one, just from farther away. The hard part is just convincing them that we realy want to help and not just go thru the motions occasionally like their previous rulers.