Name:   copperline - Subject:   Reflections on the Belgium attacks Date:   3/23/2016 4:44:20 PM

A couple of thoughts on this…   first of all, it’s the most complicated circumstances I can imagine and I  don’t have any simple suggestions to make it all right.   Far from it, I think we are going to have to live with this for a long time to come and the best advice comes to this:  if we don’t know what to do, let’s just try not to do anything that will make it worse.   And I think it’s clear we don’t know what to do in this huge mess that combines geopolitics with economics and a religious war that has been going on now for about a thousand years between Shia and Sunni Muslims.

I am extremely cautious about being sucked into escalations of all this by calls to increase the bombing and raining hell down on everyone in the region.  I assume that most of the people in the Middle East are like the farmers in the rice paddies of Viet Nam.   They care nothing about the politics of the government, and only about whether they will live long enough to feed and raise their children.   And I think that up to now, our military efforts have simply led us deeper into a quagmire.   Unlike WWII, where we believed ourselves to be liberators….   This notion has been applied and rejected in the Middle East today.

Your reaction to videos like this is understandable, as is the urge to strike back just as hard and forcefully as vengeance requires.   But I’m thinking that this is the response that the video was intended to create, that it is scripted to achieve a level of revulsion that will prompt us to retaliate in kind.   I think the strategy of Islamic Jihadists is to suck us into an ever increasing war of attrition that will only increase the alienation of the Islamic world and give more people cause to hate us.  Before we make a decision about how we will react to it, I think we should ask this:   what does ISIS want our response to this to be?  What are they trying to get us to do?   I think we should carefully consider that question, and be sure that we don’t do exactly what they wish… escalate, retaliate, bring on more military missions with catchy titles like ‘shock and awe’.   If we do that, we are probably assisting the grand strategy of the Islamic Jihad by bringing more believers into a war with the Great Satan. 

As best we can, we need to leave this war to the Sunni and the Shittes  until they realign themselves into whatever they wish to become.   The Christian West cannot determine the outcome of their religious war any more than Arab Sultans could have intervened to stop the Christian Reformation in Europe. 

I am against sanctioning torture as an operational policy of the United States military or Intelligence services.   Embracing it, I think, would have consequences beyond what we see now.   As with so many precedent setting events, we could simply cross that moral line and convince ourselves to view it as casually as we have accepted targeted assassinations anywhere over the globe using aerial drones.

After all, what is torture and where does it stop?   Did the grunts who took suspected Viet Cong up in helicopters, throwing one out the door while telling the others to cooperate … engage in torture?  If we can torture a suspected Islamic radical for information, should we also use the technique on his family members to get him to crack?

Yes, ISIS is a bitter & harsh enemy, undeterred by any of our notions of decency or morality.   And yes, where there is war, there has always been torture & brutality.   But officially embracing the methods of our enemy isn’t going to win this war… it will supply the enemy with more history to condemn us by. 

Finally, the idea of stopping immigration across borders strikes me as pretty problematic and likely to create unintended consequences.  How, for instance, does someone answer the questions at the border?  What is your religion?   Can you prove that you are a believer in an acceptable religion and reassure officials that you are telling the truth?  What if you don’t have a religion?   Are you going to be suspected of hiding something?   There isn’t a stamp on my passport for religious affiliation, and I wouldn’t want one.