Quote:
Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
So if you give me a PC "I'm horrified at your generalization" reply, I will take that as admission that you have no rebuttal. That said, my answer is, historically, yes, radical Islamist Arabs have only responded to force.
And to suggest that there can be some detante with radical Islam is ludicrous. Unlike the cold war on Communism, our enemy now is not afraid of death. You can't reason with them, you can't placate them, you can't isolate yourself from them and you can't talk to them. What form of reaction would you choose? There's no carrot.
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I was thinking that force doesn't work so well. E.g., not for the Russians in Chechnya and Afghanistan. We put panties on the heads of prisoners in Iraq, and yet they're not backing down yet -- if that doesn't stop them, what will?
So you don't mean that they respect force. You mean that there's no point in talking, we should just get all Rambo on their ass because they're trying to kill us, so we should just kill them.
I'm not really going to argue with you about this, except to note that the brilliant foreign-policy strategist George W. Bush implicitly rejected your approach when he decided to invade Afghanistan and Iraq instead of simply bombing them back to the Stone Age. I don't usually find myself touting his views, but strange bedfellows and all that.
