Michael P. O'Connor

I think that tape was faked at the NSA headquarters, it just doesn’t sound right. I think they either killed him a while back or are holding him in a hole somewhere. In either case, the terrorists are winning like crazy. You’re still comparing terrorists to our old “enemies” like Russia. Destroy the country, kill people, and you won. Yeah right. These people have been killed and oppressed for decades and we trained them well to fight against the russians. We even gave the taliban around half a billion dollars… in 2001. Killing them is not the answer. There are two things that need to happen to really win, and by win, I mean calm things down. You can’t ever win this war, it has absolutely no realistic goals. To eliminate terrorism you must kill everyone on the planet except you, since terrorism is a very violent form of protest. If you go into political areas of terrorism I’ll refer you to Iraq and any political areas involved with that war, making the US a terrorist state. Moving on to the good stuff. To win, we need to have the local population pissed off at the terrorists. If the average Iraqi has a job, something to do, and something to live for, they’re going to laugh at the religious nuts wanting to kill themselves. I think it’s really happening in Iraq, those ‘insurgents’ (one man’s terrorist/insurgent is another man’s freedom fighter, ask British historians). The civilians are tired of the daily murder and want it to end, so they will eventually turn on the insurgents. Too bad that the US is pushing for a religious state (hussein was a secularist, shi’ite are very religious) while Iran and Saudi Arabia are trying to split up Iraq in two, with the north going to the Kurds. The second thing that needs to happen is the overall quality of life needs to increase. Unfortunately, nobody in global power wants that. We, especially the US, depend on poor people all over the world to provide cheap clothing, technology, oil, etc, to sustain our level of life. If prices were to skyrocket (see Katrina), americans will realize that their quality of life, particularly inflation-adjusted wages have been dropping for decades. Why do you think we’re upset with China? They’re making money and their cost of living is going up, soon our socks will cost even more, my god! That’s how it works. Whose fault is it really? Nobodies fault. The corporations want bigger profits so they spend billions of dollars bribing the governments to make policy to make them even more money (read: guest worker program, H1B Visa’s). It’s a sad world, but a healthy revolution and civil war reset things for a few years. Look at Russia. Nothing much has changed in a hundred years. I’m paraphrasing a good quote – the middle and the upper swap sides while keeping the poor in the same place.