Originally Posted By SingleParkPassholder <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/22/world/americas/canada-terror-plot-thwarted/index.html" target="_blank">http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/22/...dex.html</a> The Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested two men with Al Qaeda ties in a plot to blow up a passenger train near Toronto. Story is fluid, so details could change.
Originally Posted By WilliamK99 I am glad this war on terror we have fought the last 10 years has been so successful!
Originally Posted By WilliamK99 I will say this, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were very effective if you take into consideration that resources that would have been spent planning and executing terrorist attacks on civilians were diverted to execute terrorist attacks against foreign invaders in Afghanistan and Iraq. With both those wars ending, I think we'll see many more terrorist attacks on "soft" targets.
Originally Posted By SingleParkPassholder "I am glad this war on terror we have fought the last 10 years has been so successful!" For someone in the military this is a rather curious statement.
Originally Posted By plpeters70 <<would have been spent planning and executing terrorist attacks on civilians were diverted to execute terrorist attacks against foreign invaders in Afghanistan and Iraq>> One could also make the case that being in those wars has caused far more people to decide to become terrorists than would have happened had we not invaded Iraq or Afghanistan. It's not like America has made a lot of friends in the Middle East because of those wars.
Originally Posted By WilliamK99 One could also make the case that being in those wars has caused far more people to decide to become terrorists than would have happened had we not invaded Iraq or Afghanistan. It's not like America has made a lot of friends in the Middle East because of those wars.<< That's why I think the war on terror just like the war on drugs is un winnable....You are correct we probably created more terrorists over the past 10 years but they were targeting troops overseas, now they are shifting focus to "soft" targets...
Originally Posted By ecdc >>the war on terror just like the war on drugs is un winnable<< Exactly...because you can't defeat methods or inanimate objects. It never should've been called the war on terror at all.
Originally Posted By TomSawyer I think we're going to see the groups who see their faiths increasingly marginalized by a more educated, more technological and more egalitarian society strike out with violence more and more. There will be more reactionary laws against equality, more strident shouting in legislative halls, and more bombs being set off to try to frighten people back to the old ways. We're seeing it over and over. The old ways can't exist in a modern secular society. A religious text that teaches that women shouldn't hold authority over men or that slavery is more acceptable than homosexuality might have been somewhat acceptable in the Bronze Age, but it is at odds with a modern post-Enlightenment society. The philosophies of Sharia or Levitical laws are irreconcilable with modern constitutions. Al Qaeda doesn't hate the West. It fears it. It looks at it in the same way that the last of the Neandertals in Europe looked at Homo Sapiens coming over the mountains from the south. They, like so many other fundamentalist and reactionary groups, see the seeds of their own irrelevance in the future life of this planet.
Originally Posted By ecdc >>The philosophies of Sharia or Levitical laws are irreconcilable with modern constitutions.<< There's other issues as well. Turkey is successful as a country because it's pretty secular as a government. I spoke to an expert on the Middle East and Islam and he pointed out that the Qur'an actually forbids charging interest in banking matters (or at least, this is how more hardline Muslims interpret it). You simply cannot have a successful modern society in this world if you can't even charge interest for loans or provide it for investments.
