Editorial: Americans need to open eyes

So...actually fighting terrorists INCREASES terrorism? No wait...it's our support of less-than-perfect 'allies' when they're fighting even WORSE scum, that's it. Or, is it our 'promotion of capitalism' because....because capitalism is bad and somehow makes everyone LESS free?

I'm confused. Maybe it's someone's 'propensity to be contradictory' that's doing that to me.....

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• Posted by KUBizGrad on March 14, 2007 at 12:16 a.m.
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Editorial: Americans need to open eyes

this piece is horrible. what is her point? that the voting public needs to call thier congressmen on all foriegn affairs and tell the congressmen how to vote on each specific bill? even though the public is given only a fraction of the information that is presented to members of congress... besides all the grammatical and syntax errors, she is completely oblivious to basic historical facts. the taliban was created by the US?? the war with iraq has increased terrorism??? how does the editorial board continue to let her keep writing these ridiculous pieces? it's so bad, it's comical. she is obviously liberally biased, but can't she at least write interesting pieces? she keeps blathering out the same dogmatic opinions over and over; bush sucks, the war in iraq is bad, feminism good, america unfairly patriarchal. does she have any new ideas?? anything interesting? or at least well written? i disagree idealogically with stangler, but at least his pieces are well written and interesting. please give stangler her copy room on the opinion pages and replace kieler's pieces with the words, "bush sucks". and then put a frowny face to let us all know that kieler wrote it.

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• Posted by todd1007 on March 14, 2007 at 4:02 a.m.
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Editorial: Americans need to open eyes

While I admit the piece is badly written, the basic points are sound.

1. The forerunner of the Taliban was armed, trained and funded by the US when Afghanistan was invaded by the Soviet Union in 1979. Fundamentalists from all over the Arab world came to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets and took their extremism back home with them. America also gave the Taliban money to put down the Afghan opium trade, which they did.

2. The War in Iraq increases terrorism by reasserting extremists' belief that America is at war with Islam. When a country invades a traditionally Muslim nation (albeit a comparatively secular one) that had nothing to do with 9/11, it simply reinforces what extremists alredy believe: that they're fighting a holy war. Many of the terrorist leaders in Iraq aren't/weren't even Iraqi and probably wouldn't even have been in the country if America hadn't invaded (al-Zarqawi, for example, who was Jordanian). And yes we all know how bad Saddam was, but they didn't seem to care how many Kurds he gassed until he started trying to press Kuwait for money to pay off the war debt (that is to say the Iran-Iraq war). Then and only then did he become public enemy number one.

3. America's propensity to support oppressive regimes in the Middle East, so long as they are pro-Western, doesn't help, either. Exhibit A for this is the Shah, put in as a pro-West puppet authority only to be toppled by Ayatollah Khomeini and replaced with the theocratic rule that Iran lives by now. Pan-Arabism has been effectively replaced with Islamism.

4. It's a BASIC tenet of counterinsurgency theory that military power is SECONDARY to ideological and political power in a guerilla war. It's not enough to be able to defeat an insurgency militarily. A regular army loses if they don't win. An insurgency wins if they don't lose. You simply cannot treat an insurgency the same as a conventional enemy. It won't work, and I dare say that's how we failed in Vietnam. You see it all throughout history: France in Algeria, the British in Cyprus, Napoleon in continental Europe, the Israelis in Gaza and the West Bank. It keeps repeating itself because people keep thinking that they can defeat insurgents through military means only, and you can't. Defeating a nontraditional force like the one in Iraq depends on cultural awareness, winning the trust of the population and successfully turning the population against radicalism. You have to let soft power do its job before you can even think of introducing hard power. It speaks to the incompetency of this administration that they think the best way to defeat terrorism is to drop a bomb and only a bomb on it. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.

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• Posted by KUJourn on March 14, 2007 at 8:20 a.m.
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Editorial: Americans need to open eyes

The MEK was placed on the terror list because the State Department wanted to appease the mullahs in Iran. They never killed Americans or civilian Iranians. Those allegations have all been proven false and the EU high court annuled the EU's decision to put the MEK on the terror list. The Iran Policy Committe has systematically proven false the allegations against the MEK in several books and white papers. The MEK does not want any countries money or weapons. They just want a secular democratic Iran.

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• Posted by shah312 on March 15, 2007 at 9:54 a.m.
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Editorial: Americans need to open eyes

Why in the world would the US "government" want to propagate terrorism? Simple. To justify a permanent war economy just like it did by perpetuating the Cold War.

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• Posted by alum79 on March 15, 2007 at 12:03 p.m.
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