Alternative way of addressing terrorism

[maui9002]

While I am not naive enough to dismiss terrorism as a serious problem, it seems to me that we've wasted so much in our approach to dealing with the problem. The current administration, playing on people's fears post 9/11, has launched an ill conceived war in Iraq, reduced our liberties and invaded our privacy here at home in the interests of national security, adopted questionable policies regarding detention and torture, flamed the passions of anti American sentiment at least throughout the Muslim world, insulted our long time allies, wasted billions of dollars that could have been put to more productive use, and adopted a strategy that has led to the deaths of untold numbers of Iraqis and Afghanis in addition to almost 4000 US servicemen and women. I raise this topic because I've been reading a book titled "Three Cups of Tea--One Man's Mission to Promote Peace....One School at a Time" by Greg Mortensen and David Oliver Relin, which chronicles a wonderful story about an American climber's mission to build schools in northern Pakistan. Because he adopted the culture of villagers who sheltered him when he became lost on an failed expedition to K-2, because he followed through on his promise to build them a school, because he listened to and used local tribesmen (instead of American contractors) to build schools and other useful projects in the region, because he never tried to push his own culture or religion and respected the local culture and Islam (learning their language, wearing their clothes, eating their food, and learning to pray as a Muslim), because he recognized how important it was to empower women by educating girls (whose education is often overlooked in these areas), and because he listened humbly to the concerns of the local people rather than push his own agenda, Greg Mortensen, with a limited budget, has been able to transform lives by building more than 30 schools in the region, earn respect for Americans, educate thousands of illiterate village children, and provide an alternative to the fundamentalist madrassas that appear to foment terrorism and hate for the West, all without economic sanctions, bombs and soldiers, outside contractors, tax dollars, or any U.S. government assistance. Isn't this a more promising avenue to go down regarding responding to terrorism? Even if we continue other policies ostensibly adopted to protect the American people, it seems to me we should be focusing more of our efforts and resources on demonstrating to the Muslim world what we can do to help--I also understand that at least some of our troops stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan are trying to help the locals; it just seems we should become more involved in assistance projects without the military presence. Just one man's view.

[Uncle Joe]

1. I believe we as a nation have become accustomed to using

a meat cleaver when a scalpel would be far more efficient. Turning a criminal enterprise "terrorism" in to a military war with the dynamic of creating more terrorists than friends while also turning a medical issue "drug addiction" in to a criminal one, with the dynamic of creating more criminals, than citizens.

I've come to the conclusion that current leadership is either very short term in it's thinking or it's long term with the goal of creating escalating chaos for the sake of divide and conquer purposes. The problem with that approach is that you can't continually divide and conquer forever, things will only be divided so far before they unite against you. Maybe that's what they want as well, then they can kill everybody with the exception of a very small clique of people and get the population down and not worry about issues such as global warming climate change, etc.