31–40 of 69 posts
Terrorism doesn't work? ETA in Spain only disbanded when the government stopped banning political parties linked to ETA. IRA in Ireland managed to give the Irish people their independence. FARC in Colombia pushed the government to allow a vote on a truce, a truce so bad the people voted against it.
That is a vast, vast oversimplification of the journey to Ireland's independence, which is actually only a small part of the history of the various IRA's.
Modern-day terrorism is a recruitment scheme. Any attack has the effect of increasing hostilities between groups. Imagine being a teenager with an identity crisis who happens to be part of a minority that the less intelligent half of your home country hates and despises. What group are you most likely to join? And what caused said hate and despise to grow? Right, terrorism. More generally put: Virtually any organizat…
Breivik was an isolated incident, deadly but isolated non less. There is no correct response to terrorism. All terrorists are different. The IRA isn't the FARC or this or that palestinian groups or Al Qaida or Daesh. Sometimes there is a political solution, sometimes there isn't. There is no political solution with Daesh, these people want to exterminate their enemies, the only solution is to exterminate them before they do.
If we're talking about the success or failure of terrorism in the Middle East, it's maybe worth considering that while it's not worked out for the Palestinians, it worked out OK for Israel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Irgun_attacks Edit: Or if you prefer you can throw away any data that doesn't back up the hypothesis and you can believe whatever you want.
It absolutely did work in the case of 9/11. It forced Muslims to take sides, that's why Muslims follow their religion in a stricter fashion today,especially in the west, in time of war there can be no moderation and Muslims feel they are at war against non Muslims,whether they admit it or not. And it had an effect of humiliating USA in front of the whole world, but one has to be a non US citizen to understand that fa…
It is not daily fear of AQ that has Muslims wearing their religiously proscribed clothes.... it is honoring their religion. Specifically, the strain of hard-line Islam which Saudi Arabia has been pushing. That's the underlying theme which encouraged both the rise of AQ and more conservative Islamic attire.
"The most workable definition of terrorism that has been published is 'the intentional use of, or threat to use violence against civilians or against civilian targets, in order to attain political aims'" So, the US bombing of TV stations in Yugoslavia or Al Jazeera in Baghdad would definitely qualify.
He seems to have completely missed the reason for 9/11, which is not strange since it was not until the 2004 speech ( http://worldpress.org/Americas/1964.cfm ) that bin Laden explained the reason for the attacks, namely "bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy". In this light it must be regarded as a great success, not a failure, especially since the self bleeding politics continued without much opposition long a…
He seems to have completely missed the reason for 9/11, which is not strange since it was not until the 2004 speech ( http://worldpress.org/Americas/1964.cfm ) that bin Laden explained the reason for the attacks, namely "bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy". In this light it must be regarded as a great success, not a failure, especially since the self bleeding politics continued without much opposition long a…
I'll agree that 9/11 was successful. Bin Laden clearly wanted to damage the US in some way, and got deeper damages than he could dream about. But I doubt he had any intention of "bleeding them at the point of bankruptcy" at the planning stage.
If we're talking about the success or failure of terrorism in the Middle East, it's maybe worth considering that while it's not worked out for the Palestinians, it worked out OK for Israel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Irgun_attacks Edit: Or if you prefer you can throw away any data that doesn't back up the hypothesis and you can believe whatever you want.
Yep, it worked out really well for Israel, because all of the Irgun gangs became statesmen or respected military leaders.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For instance would the Irish people have their independence from the UK if there was no IRA? Depends which movement called the IRA we're talking about and (more generally) what's meant by "terrorism". There's a degree of a difference between the tactical approach of IRA that won the independence of the Irish Free State in the early twentieth century through classic guerrilla warfare tactics aimed at weakening Briti…
Didn't the provisional IRA force the government's hand in the Good Friday Agreement? There's a fairly good chance the Catholic portion of Northern Ireland, which generally favors independence, will overtake the Protestant population which generally favors union with Great Britain. The GFA allows a popular vote on the matter. So by securing a vote, NI will likely go back to Ireland in a generation or two. There were a…
They could have had something similar to the Good Friday Agreement much earlier had they been willing to pursue that type of settlement by political means earlier.