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Originally Posted by sperbonzo
What it fails to recognise is that with the system as it exists in the middle east today, ANY action OR inaction on the part of the west will have terrorist repercussions. Look at the vast number of hijackings and bombings in Europe in the 70s.
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In the short-term you are almost certainly correct. We are faced with hundreds of factions with many different motivations and objectives. But it is wrong to in effect imply that the actions of the 70's were spontaneous events.
There are two basic threads in the Middle East. One began in the 1920's as the British surrendered their influence to the US and the US embarked on a foreign policy intended to keep the region unstable, so as to protect its supplies of cheap oil (and allow US companies to maximize their profits from this trade). The other thread is western (and particularly US) support for Israel.
The bombings you wrote about were a direct result of that latter policy and in so far as Israel is now negotiating with the PLO (albeit not in name), it is another illustration of the point that terrorism works. In terms of the wider arab problem, the west faces a situation similar to Israel which is that while Israel is now willing to talk to old enemies, taking too long to do so means now facing new enemies (Hammas). Israel's problems may superficially look like a single chain of events, but in reality they are close to the end of a cycle which began post-1967 and early in a second cycle that only started in the mid-1980's. The rhetoric reserved for Hammas today is very similar to the way that they were talking about the PLO 10+ years ago.
The west certainly faces many more difficulties. 80 years of US foreign policy towards the region as a whole and its support of Israel, has made enemies of almost every country there. In addition, we have supported regimes in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait which do not have popular support, virtually guaranteeing that when those regimes are overthrown (I would guess in the next 5-10 years) our last allies will be gone. As well as facing groups with genuine grievances which could be resolved if we had the willingness to do so, we are also up against people - some so-called religious leaders in particular - who are using anti-American feeling as cynically as our own leaders manipulate us, solely to advance themselves.
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Originally Posted by sperbonzo
If a successful democracy is established in Iraq, and there is open trade, then the people will no longer be nearly as open to the idea of terrorism, and they will be more vested in keeping things stable and peaceful, both inside their countries, and with trading partners.
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You are ignoring the fact that for hundreds of years the middle east was the trading crossroads of the civilized world and that right into the 1960's several mid-east countries still had close ties with Britain and France. All without democracy. Mid-east terrorism has grown solely out of the rise of pan-arab nationalism and that is what needs to be addressed if we really want a solution. The US public is being sold democracy as a solution because it's an appealing magic-bullet concept and that is all. If the US government cares at all about democracy in Iraq, it is only because the majority there are not strong enough to take power without US support and we can demand a high price for that support.