Quote:
Originally posted by fintstone
This is what Putin gets for fighting a "more sensitive" war on terror. right from the Kerry playbook. I am glad our leader has not wavered. Putin and the Russians will not make such a mistake again. Don't be suprised to see a little wholesale slaughter.
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Don't know where you get your facts (as opposed to your slogans). Putin is not fighting a "sensitive" war on terror. There is nothing "sensitive" about Putin (ex-head of the KGB) and the Russian government at all. They are about as hardline as you would like the US to be. The Russian military is fighting a full-blown war against the Chechens - does appx 160,000 civilians killed by Russian armor, airstrikes, artillery, etc sound "sensitive"?
Okay, maybe there hasn't actually been as much "wholesale slaughter" as you advocate. There are appx 1 million native Chechens living in Chechnya, and if the Russian military kills all 1 million of them, then there probably won't be much more Chechen terrorism in Russia. I can see some drawbacks to that particular "Chechen solution".
Look, it is nice to be all macho and pretend that GI boots and B-52s will solve every problem, especially when those won't be your own boots. The fact - as opposed to the slogan - is that military force is not going to be the
complete answer to terrorism. Military force will be an important
part of the answer. But, more importantly, we'll have to solve the festering underlying conflicts that are breeding and motivating the terrorists in the first place.
So long as Israel and the Palestinians are at each others' throats, with the US as Israel's sole economic and military backer, many young poor Arabs will regard the US as an enemy and be ripe for terrorist recruiting. Unfortunately, this will now also be the case so long as US troops occupy Iraq. If we don't resolve those underlying conflicts, and instead devote all our efforts to the military part of the solution, we will have only two choices: (1) suffer through a never-ending and escalating "war on terror", or (2) commit genocide by exterminating entire populations. A few posters on this board might recommend such "wholesale slaughter" but it would be the end of the US as we know it.