Right now the administration wants us to think that the best way for us to achieve safety and security is to protect ourselves from outside threats in every way we can; by creating "no-fly" lists of individuals who cannot fly in American airspace, by beefing up our military, by monitoring domestic and international communications, or by attacking nations which foster terrorism against us. That strategy may work in the short term, but... will it really protect us forever? We can't ever plan for or defend against every possible attack. Terrorists will always be thinking of strategies that we haven't yet thought of. I fear that in attacking Iraq we've taken a country which really wasn't a threat in the first place and made it and surrounding countries even more hostile towards us. I feel less safe now after we've attacked Iraq than I did before.
Protecting ourselves or pre-emptively attacking what we perceive as threats without trying to understand and end the source of the conflict means that we and our children will be continually living in fear.
How can we ever call ourselves safe or secure when there are enemies out there who want to attack us again with planes or, god forbid, with dirty bombs, or with smuggled portable nukes? Attacking other countries without adequate justification just perpetuates the anger that terrorists have against us.
There's an alternative path to living in fear that I dearly hope a future administration will follow: it's eliminating the anger and fear that cause these attacks in the first place. I don't mean appeasement, nor do I mean pacifism-- we need to defend ourselves and we need to attack countries which themselves attack us or host our attackers, such as we did with Afganistan. But we need to understand why certain groups and ethnicities hate America, and when we have that understanding we can start to tell them-- and show them-- why their feelings are wrong. We need to persuade the rest of the world through diplomatic means that they don't need to hate us. And if we can't change the minds of the terrorists, then we need to change the minds of the societies they live in, the people who support them, and the future generations that could replace them.
We can either eternally protect ourselves and alienate the rest of the world out of fear that some day another attack will be launched, or we can work to persuade the rest of the world that they should not and need not attack us. It's when we start to do the latter that I feel we'll have achieved our common goal of safety and security.
Post a comment