Terrorism: A Question Without an Answer?

Let me preface this by saying that my mother-in-law died in the World Trade Center. The issues surrounding that and how they affect my viewpoint are ones that are way too complex to look into here. I'm just letting you know that bit of background so you can take it into your calculations.

Terrorism. Specifically, what do we do about terrorism? How do we stop it?

Here is one truth I feel about terrorism. No amount of violence will cause terrorists to stop doing what they do, not unless you kill every terrorist, their wives, their kids, their brothers, their sisters, their cousins and their parents. One living survivor is enough to keep the hatred going. Violence cannot end this, except (maybe) through genocide, something that we all want to avoid.

Here is another truth I feel about terrorism. We find ourselves in a world where we have created the means for one person to quickly and (relatively) easily kill thousands. The goal of military technology has always been to kill more with less. I'm not saying that as a criticism - countless soldiers have been spared because we developed better ways of killing enemy soldiers. War is horrible and killing is horrible, but if you are in a war, it is incumbent upon you to win that war with as little hurt to yourself as possible. The net result is the ability of one man to kill thousands. That ability, though, is what gives terrorism its teeth. We opened this Pandora's box, we loosed this genie from its bottle. The ability of terrorists to do their work is the consequence of that.

Here is another truth I feel about terrorism. Allowing those in a minority to dictate anything to those in the majority is a very bad idea. When as few as five people are capable of bringing down one of the Trade Center towers, that means any five people with an axe to grind are capable of devastating acts. Can we allow those same five folks to dictate policy to the country? Of course not.

So, having said all that, what does it mean?

In summation, we cannot bargain with terrorists. We cannot fight terrorists. Even the smallest groups of people are capable of conducting devastating terrorist attacks. Sounds pretty hopeless, really.

I think that the upshot of this is as follows: terrorism will always be with us and always be an issue, no matter what we do. We can do a few things though. We need to look at why the people who conduct these attacks decide that this is the proper answer. We need to understand the despair and anger. In cases where the anger has some rational basis, we need to examine what is causing the anger and see what we can do to mitigate it. Terrorism's mother's milk is anger and despair, its lifeblood is hate. Remove these things are terrorism will wither away. This isn't to say that terrorists should go unpunished - those who commit these acts, those who plan them and those who finance them deserve the full weight of our displeasure. This punishment needs to be tempered, though, with some degree of mercy and humanity. If the punishment is so harsh as to create more hatred and anger and despair, then it merely creates more terrorists. We also have to accept that being a target for terrorism is the cost of doing business as a superpower. We cannot address all the various gripes the world and its billions have. The tricky bit is to know which groups to listen to and which ones not to listen to; which groups to keep a close eye on and which groups to disregard. I didn't say it was easy, but this balancing act is the only way I know of to counter the threat of terrorism.