Immanuel Kant called absolute moral imperatives that are used to carry out immoral acts “a radical evil.” He wrote that this kind of evil was always a form of unadulterated self-love. It was the worst type of self-deception
Now, Robert Pape is the gold standard when it comes to modern terrorism studies. Actually, the world’s leading practitioners of suicide terrorism are the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka–a secular group drawn from Hindu families. 99% of “terrorism” is for political reasons. The CIA has called this “Blow-back”for decades.
Though it is hard for many to believe, honest studies show that the real motivation behind the September 11 attacks and the vast majority of other instances of suicide terrorism is not that our enemies are bothered by our way of life. Neither is it our religion, or our wealth. Rather, it is primarily occupation. If you were to imagine for a moment how you would feel if another country forcibly occupied the United States, had military bases and armed soldiers present in our hometowns, you might begin to understand why foreign occupation upsets people so much. Robert Pape has extensively researched this issue and goes in depth in his book “Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It”. In fact, of 2,200 incidents of suicide attacks he has studied worldwide since 1980, 95% were in response to foreign occupation.
Pape notes that before our invasion of Iraq, only about 10% of suicide terrorism was aimed at Americans or American interests. Since, then however, not only is suicide terrorism greatly on the rise, but 91% of it is now directed at us.
Instead, we chose a course of action that led to the further loss of 8,000 American lives, left 40,000 wounded and has hundreds of thousands seeking help at the Veterans Administration. We are three to four trillion dollars poorer. Our military is spread dangerously thin around the globe, at the expense of protection here at home. Not only that, but we have allowed our freedoms to be greatly threatened and undermined from within. The Patriot Act, warrantless searches and wiretapping, abuse of habeus corpus, useless and humiliating searches at airports are just a few examples of how we’ve allowed the terrorists to “win” by making our country less free.
Suicide terrorism did not exist in Iraq before we got there. Now it does. There are no known instances of Iranians committing suicide terrorism. If we invade and occupy Iran, expect that to change, too.
Muslim terrorism, specifically, has exponentially increased since the 90s, in all it’s manifestations.
The AQ brand is a recent evolution(global Jihad), which, ironically, was funded and trained by US forces back in the 80s including children’s books, to fight the soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Surely some of you will find this post distasteful. Frankly, I don’t care. Self-examination is something rare for Americans. Just a word of advice. It might be a good time to start. The world is in the midst of a transition.
1) change and process are at the heart of our universe; 2) the change we do see is governed by an infinite net of causal conditions and relationships; and 3) everything is interdependent.
