When George Bush pitched the Iraq war to the American people, he made it sound more appealling by saying it was part of our War on Terror. But has our invasion or Iraq really deterred terrorism?
Before I explain my case let me just say that I think terrorism is disgusting, evil, and abhorent. I do not support terrorism in any form and it is not a legitimate form of protest. That being said, the way we're going about fighting it is innefective and even counterproductive in many ways.
Since 9/11 our general policy on terrorism has been to find and kill or arrest every terrorist in the world. Sounds pretty good, if only it were that simple. This strategy assumes that terrorists are seperate from everyone else, when in reality, any person can become a terrorist or a supporter of terrorism. It also assumes that we can kill every terrorist in the world, and then terrorism will no longer exist. Even if we could find and kill every terrorist in the world (which we can't), by the time we were finished we would find that the hatred and angst we had stirred would have created ten times more terrorists.
We were definitely right to attack al-qaeda in Afghanistan. The U.S. and the rest of the world saw the evil atrocity al-qaeda had committed in the United States and agreed that we had to go to Afghanistan and disable the terrorist structure that had done this to us. The war may have stirred up some anti-American sentiment within the Muslim world, but people also saw how horrible Al-Qaeda and the Taliban were. The war in Afghanistan probably didn't anger anyone who didn't already passionately hate America.
The War in Iraq however has created tremendous amounts of anti-American sentiment and inspired many people to become terrorists. Some people may argue we did Iraq a favor by getting rid of Saddam, but that is not the common view of most Iraqis or Muslims. It's not very hard to understand why Iraqis would oppose the U.S. invasion of their country. Does anyone really want their country to be invaded?? And what most American news networks didn't show a lot of was the thousands of Iraqis killed, injured, or blown out of their homes by the U.S. invasion. Most people in the Muslim world view the Iraq war as an attempt to increase U.S. power in the region.
As we now see in Iraq, thousands of people are now fighting against the U.S. in Iraq. Were these people terrorists before the U.S. invasion? Most of them weren't. The invasion has increased hatred toward the U.S. among millions of Iraqis and other Muslims. More Muslims are now willing to fight against the U.S. than before the war. When the U.S. pulls out of Iraq, will all the insurgents go back to their homes and start leading peaceful lives? Some of them might, but many of them might retain their hatred of America and commit more terrorism against the U.S. Hatred towards the U.S. in the Muslim world has undoubtedly increased since the Iraq War, and terrorism thrives on hatred.
There are a few things we can do to help curb terrorism. The first thing is to get out of Iraq as soon as we can secure the peace. We should also hold elections, so that the Iraqi leaders are not veiwed as puppets of America. Another thing we can do is not invade any more Muslim countries unless it is absolutely necessary. Every country we invade just convinces many Muslims that the war on terrorism is more a war on Islam. We can also end our policy of equanimity towards Israel. We rightly condemn Palestinian acts of terror, but we don't condemn Israel going into Palestine and killing large numbers of civilians. More Palestinians have died in the last few years than Israelis as a result of Israeli-Palestinian violence. We should still support Israel, but we should also show that we are generally concerned about the plight of the Palestinian people. We should help support Palestinians in decreasing poverty, and establishing their own state in the West Bank and Gaza. When we take actions such as these our standing in the Middle East will increase, and hatred will subside, and with it terrorism.
We need to rethink our strategy in the Middle East and make sure that the measures we take don't just make more people want to kill us.
