a plan for the middle east you don't hear everyday

fred smith wrote:
I want to kill all of the fanatic Islamist fascists because there can be no co-existence between us. If you believe in tolerance, freedom, democracy and justice, you cannot compromise with these people any more than we could with Hitler, Stalin or Mao. We can contain or try to limit their influence or take them out entirely when we have the opportunity but does anyone here want to stand up for them and their kind of society? for Hitler? Stalin? Mao? as just another kind of system? civilization?

yi'shou wrote - Here's the crux of it: "there can be no co-existence between us." At that point all that's left is consensus by genocide. Kill everybody who disagrees, before they can kill you first.

If you believe in tolerance, freedom, democracy and justice, then you can't base a system on killing people who won't go along with you. Even the ones who are opposed to tolerance, freedom, democracy and justice. Those are the people you've got to either convince or isolate. Make them the crazy voice in the wilderness, the ones whose houses you don't let your children play near, the ones you hurry past without making eye contact when you see them in the street. If you can't convince or isolate them, then your tolerance, freedom, democracy and justice aren't going to last very long.

And what's to stop us from applying that doctrine to, say, atheists? Liberals? Homosexuals? Evangelical Christians? Then we are Hitler, Stalin, Mao; the only distinction is that we're holding up what we consider to be the right way of life, the right values. Someone will jump in and call this moral relativism, and maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but most of all it's pragmatism. There is no "my belief and no other" system that can exist without devolving into genocide, so the only viable option is the enforce some form of "live and let live," and if your belief system cannot tolerate the existence of other belief systems, that sucks for you but don't expect the rest of us to care. (This is not a slippery slope argument: I'm not saying it'll be Muslim fanatics one day and left-handed people the next. I'm saying that if we go for the easy solution, 'everything's great if the right people are dead', we'll already have become morally despicable ourselves. Of course, we'll probably kick up enough resentment along the way to sustain the conflict indefinitely, but that's just a practical issue.)

"Kill all the bad people" doesn't work as a solution. There's too many of them, they're too hard to spot, and once we're done more will just show up to replace them. And even if we did manage to succeed, it'd be at a terrible cost. The solution has to be "make it so the bad people can't convince anyone." A terrorist without a supportive community doesn't get very far.

So our job is to get rid of that supportive community. Whether we think we've done something wrong or not, we have to look at our actions and their actual results. Not say "oh, these people have no justifiable grievance," not tell ourselves that we aren't at fault (because it doesn't matter if we are or not), but say "what can we do to get rid of these people's greivance?" Maybe it's a perception problem, maybe it's a problem of what we actually do (or fail to do), but being calmly assured of our own innocence doesn't solve the conflict. And it certainly doesn't chip away at ObL's support. This will no doubt require changes in our behavior...