It’s the 5 million pound elephant in the room. What happened in Paris last Friday. The brutal attacks and violence. And watching the many reactions to it, I’m absolutely dumbfounded and pissed off at how many American conservatives are screaming bloody murder and want to mire us in yet another long war against a group with which we can not win.
Let me say that again: you can’t win.
This is terrorism. They feed on fear. And right now you’re all acting like a bunch of scared five year olds screaming about the boogeyman. Get over yourselves. Oh god, you got a little bloody. These folks live in blood every day. How many civilians did our government kill in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan already trying to get these assholes? All it did was make things worse, we destablized the region even further. We’ve spent nearly a century up to our elbows with meddling in the middle east to suit our desires, and its gotten worse and worse and worse. When will we learn? They live this every day, they don’t care if you kill another ten or fifty or a thousand of their members. Because they know we’ll hit others we didn’t mean to, and more will join them, and the terror will continue.
The response to violence isn’t more violence. It won’t stop. We tried that already, remember? Iraq and Afghanistan, drone strikes in Pakistan. It hasn’t solved the problem. The only way to solve the problems is to let them bloody us… and respond by feeding the people, helping them rebuild their homes and shops, and then leaving them to fuck alone when they ask to be left alone.
Imagine if we had done that in 1991. If we had actually helped the Kurds instead of backing off and letting Saddam gas them using the very weapons we helped him obtain. Helped Afghani’s after the Soviet Union withdrew, rebuilding their towns, building a government, not abandoning them and letting the Taliban take over. Imagine if we turned our trillions of dollars spent on war each year to efforts to build peace around the world.
Maybe more people would be on our side instead of joining the terrorists. Which president actually got a major mid-east country to sign a peace deal with Israel? It sure as hell wasn’t Reagan or either Bush. It was Carter, who believed in peace and negotiation, and of helping folks build something, not tear it down.
Violence won’t win. So stand up, realize your nose is going to get bloody from time to time, and help the world heal by building something better, not launching more violence in return. Turn the other cheek, you dumb fucks. Learn something.
Done, moving on. Poorly said I’m sure, but who cares.