Becoming What One Hates
Israel authorities have explained that their plan is to destroy Hezbollah. When people think about Hezbollah in a vaccuum, that actually sounds good. Hezbollah is an organization of ruthless suicide bombers who are pretty undiscriminating about how they take with them. They're generally religious extremists. If they could be destroyed, the world might be a better place.
Here's the problem: There's no way to command compliance from a suicide bomber. He doesn't care whether he lives or dies, and in fact, he'd really like to get the seventy virgins. (An aside: Most religions--and Islam perhaps more than most--try to promote sexual restraint, but it doesn't strike the suicide bombers as a little unlikely that Allah would provide martyrs with virgins to service them.) So the only way to destroy the Hezbollah suicide bombers is to destroy all of them. There are a couple of problems here: First, it can be a little difficult to identify suicide bombers. Most of the time, they look a lot like any other young man you might meet on the street. And when you do catch them--if you can catch them before they blow themselves up, given the difficulty just mentioned--you actually create an aggrieved Arab who is, in fact, a potential recruit to the cause. This is how this so-called war on terrorism differs from every other war: The ability and will of nations to make war could be destroyed and nations can be defeated; for terrorists, what most people regard as defeat is, in fact, victory.
If an attempt to destroy terrorism by force is to work, it must somehow provide for the defeat of every terrorist and everyone who might become a terrorist. It must, in other words, become as ruthless and indiscriminant as the terrorists. And even if a nation--say, the United States or Israel--could wipe out all of the terrorists, the acts that nation had to commit in doing so would be as reprehensible as those that the terrorists committed. This raises a serious question when a nation's leader proudly proclaims himself to be a devout adherent of a religion: If terrorist acts are sins, can similar acts committed to stop terrorism be virtues? I suspect that Hell, if it exists, will be filled with leaders of this decade who were dead set on destroying each other.
Here's the problem: There's no way to command compliance from a suicide bomber. He doesn't care whether he lives or dies, and in fact, he'd really like to get the seventy virgins. (An aside: Most religions--and Islam perhaps more than most--try to promote sexual restraint, but it doesn't strike the suicide bombers as a little unlikely that Allah would provide martyrs with virgins to service them.) So the only way to destroy the Hezbollah suicide bombers is to destroy all of them. There are a couple of problems here: First, it can be a little difficult to identify suicide bombers. Most of the time, they look a lot like any other young man you might meet on the street. And when you do catch them--if you can catch them before they blow themselves up, given the difficulty just mentioned--you actually create an aggrieved Arab who is, in fact, a potential recruit to the cause. This is how this so-called war on terrorism differs from every other war: The ability and will of nations to make war could be destroyed and nations can be defeated; for terrorists, what most people regard as defeat is, in fact, victory.
If an attempt to destroy terrorism by force is to work, it must somehow provide for the defeat of every terrorist and everyone who might become a terrorist. It must, in other words, become as ruthless and indiscriminant as the terrorists. And even if a nation--say, the United States or Israel--could wipe out all of the terrorists, the acts that nation had to commit in doing so would be as reprehensible as those that the terrorists committed. This raises a serious question when a nation's leader proudly proclaims himself to be a devout adherent of a religion: If terrorist acts are sins, can similar acts committed to stop terrorism be virtues? I suspect that Hell, if it exists, will be filled with leaders of this decade who were dead set on destroying each other.
posted by amsterdr at 5:29 PM
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