opinions-political-whyFightingTerrorismInTheMiddleEastIsABadIdea

Email to the U.S. Department of Defence send aug 29 '06 in reply to a speech by the Secretary of Defence:

I apologize but I wasn't able to find a full transcript of Rumsfeld's talk, so I am only emailing about the comment I read in http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Rumsfeld.html

> Can we truly afford to believe somehow, some way, vicious extremists can be appeased? he asked.

Mr. Rumsfeld is misunderstanding the arguments against our foreign wars.

The strongest argument against the war is not that if we stop fighting over there, that people who are now fighting against us will stop threatening us.

The argument against the war is that in any war, we cannot avoid accidentally bothering and hurting civilians sometimes. This means that we are making enemies of the children of the innocent civilians who get restricted or detained by Americans or who get caught in the crossfire. The argument against the war is that by turning the children against us, we will be in a worse position in 15 years time than we would have been in if we had done nothing.

In other words, the rate at which we catch current enemies is smaller than the rate at which we create new enemies in the future by our impact on foreign civilians. Therefore our actions are actually making us less secure in the long-term.

This argument does not suggest "appeasement" -- it does not suggest that we can 'cut a deal' with anybody. The argument is simply that realistically speaking, our actions are decreasing rather than increasing our security because of the unavoidability of "collateral damage".

Please pass this on to Mr. Rumsfeld :)

thanks for your time