Can someone summarize please?
Radical muslims are creating terrorist cells in Europe. They have already tried to carry out many attacks including the train bombing in Spain. Many Muslim immigrants are coming to Europe. They can't find a job and turn back to religion and some find an extremist mosque/peope/iman.
Actually, I see it as more of a problem with shameless, power hungry men using hapless schleps who have a motivation to "serve god" into being footsoldiers for them. It's all about power and political gain. Does anyone here actually think that most of these men at the top are uninterested in the power that they weild? Fundamentalism in ANY form is a powderkeg waiting for a spark to set it off.
Who attacked who first?
This is a bit harder. The idea that the first were the students in 1980 in Iran is ludicrous. There were radicals before that, some even turning violent. Look at our own home-grown terrorists in the 1960's and 1970's. Look at the massacre of the Israli atheletes at Entebbe (sp?) Look at the rash of airline hijackings in the 1960's and 1970's ....and all this is just in recent history. Seems to me that 1700's Brittania looked at a few colonists chucking tea over the side of a ship in Boston Harbor as terrorists...since this was a direct attempt to disrupt the economy of the empire. In fact, they could be classed as terrorist insurgents because, as history documents, there were even incidents of terrible attrocities against British soldiers as well as civillian loyalists. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
The US sent an ill fated Special Forces mission to free the hostages and had many problems. For years US foreign policy simply ignored a growing threat. This was up to and including the Clinton administration. After 9-11, things changed and these extremists were given more attention.
Each administration has had their way of dealing with this. Carter initiated his ill fated rescue attempt. Reagan negotiated with Iran...resulting in the release of the hostages a mere week after his inauguration as president in 1981, yet bombing the crap out of Quadaffi's residential compound in 1985 in retaliation for a terrorist attack on the Lockerbee plane. Bush 41 didn't really have a focus on terrorism,though he had served as the one of the cheif architechts of the Arms for Hostages deal with Iran...a declared "terrorist" state.. and we suffered no real attacks on that fron in his administration...Clinton...well, weeks after his inauguration, the USS Cole was bombed. This brought home the need for vigilance...so Clinton made Richard Clark the head of his anti-terrorism task force. Through this, the perpetrators of the first world trade center bombing were caugh, proscecuted, and punished. Clinton also did attempt a missile strike on Osama BinLaden, but missed as Bin Laden had moved to a location shortly before the cruise missiles came screaing in. Clinton's administration had become more vigilant than we'd been before...this combined with a lot of luck helped foil the millinium bomb plot on the Canadian border when a man on his way to LAX was detained and searceh...locating a large quantity of plastic explosives. The people around at the time of the Clinton administration also were lucky enough to catch a massive coordinated attack using planes as missils. As the outgoing administration, in 2000 during the transition of administrations, Sandy Berger and Richard Clark attempted to make it clear that they saw international islamic terrorism as the #1 securtiy threat to the US...but because it was someone associated with the Clinton's, this was disregarded. Instead our illustrious National Security Advisor, Dr. Condaleeza Rice, decided it to be more important to work on a missile defense system.
So, we bombed the crap out of Afghanistan to corner this dude...but then, when we nearly had him, Rummy tells our boys "Okay....now stand down...we're going to hire the "Northern Alliance" to go in and ge him....so that doesn't work. What do we do? Oh, what the hey...let's just invade Iraq
So what to do? Well, teaching tolerance and providing steps to reduce poverty are always a good start. People who have their basics and some meaning to their lives tend to be much more peaceable.
Maybe we should start by renewing our efforts to "Capture dead or alive" and stop invading countries that haven't really provoked us.
JMO, of course...
