Name:   copperline - Subject:   Reflections on the Belgium attacks Date:   3/24/2016 9:19:35 AM

I hear what you guys are saying, but that’s not the only way to look at it.   I wouldn’t characterize what is going on as WW3 because doing so inflates the importance of Islamic radicals well beyond what they deserve.      That said, they can and will do much harm in Europe…. but terrorist attacks over here are more likely to be felt thru ‘lone wolves’ who are less well trained and coordinated.    Lone wolves are certainly dangerous, but they are not an existential threat to the US.    Terror cells in Europe during the 70’s were setting off bombs but didn’t bring down the world order… though at the time, there were certainly people who thought that it would.

The world is full of evil people, I agree.   Our best hope is not to become part of that evil by making emotional decisions that pull us further into this quagmire.   I tend to be more than a little cautious about our mindset as a nation… are we inflating the threat posed by ISIS with our own rhetoric?  After all, we invaded Iraq by following faulty information about the true threat level and talked ourselves into believing we would be hailed as hero-liberators.   We bombed Libya’s government into oblivion without enough thought to the subsequent impact on that region.    Now we are again building toward another action, but we really don’t know where the target is.   It really troubles me that we might even consider massive attacks on population centers in the Middle East.   This is a war with an unconventional enemy.   They have no navy, no missile systems, no air force, and the equipment they obtained from our previous efforts to arm the Iraqi army will wear out quickly.  What they do have is lots of people who can still be radicalized.

I do have strong pacifist leanings, but mainly I am concerned about how we talk ourselves into taking actions that we later regret, or that we may be seduced by our anger & revulsion into taking steps that result in exactly the opposite of what we hope to accomplish.   When you don’t know how to solve a problem, you just have to focus on avoiding things that make it worse.