UK plot "A Taste of What's to Come?": "You can't wage war on a tactic."

[marmar]

A Taste of What Is to Come
by Charley Reese
The plot to blow up several American and British airplanes over the Atlantic is merely a taste of things to come. Fortunately, this particular plot was foiled by Scotland Yard and the British counterintelligence people. The death toll might well have exceeded that of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

The lesson to be learned is that terrorism is a tactic, and you can't wage war against a tactic. Just because you block one punch doesn't mean that others won't follow.

The root cause of terrorism is politics. People who feel offended, abused, or injured by the policies of the major powers but have no armies with which to defend themselves often resort to terror. It's the only weapon available to the weak.

When you find yourself the target of terrorist tactics, you can't kill your way out of it. That's because, if left unchanged, the same policies that produced the terrorists will keep on producing them. As a matter of fact, the more terrorists you kill, the more you create, especially in cultures where revenge is an important ingredient.

What is needed is a reassessment of our foreign policy. For example, why are we hated by so many Palestinians? The answer is easy: We have been grossly unfair to them. Whatever the Israelis wished to do to them – kill them, destroy their homes, uproot their orchards, confiscate their lands, subject them to all kinds of humiliation – has been perfectly OK with the U.S. government. The last American president who was unafraid of offending the Israelis was Dwight Eisenhower. In 1956, he told them to get out of the Sinai or he would freeze all of their assets. They got out of the Sinai.

The complete article is at: http://www.antiwar.com/reese/?articleid=9523