The Cycle of Violence.

You people who think we can solve all this by more violence.
By us. Harumph yourself.

Don't be an Icelander. Be an ostrich with it's head in the sand for HERE is the truth:
(six paragraphs...a summary)
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April 24, 2004

"I mean sooner or later terror and weapons of mass destruction are going to get together, it’s just a matter of time. This reflects an extremely broad consensus among analysts. There’s also a consensus o­n how to deal with terror, a strong consensus and it has two elements: there are the terrorists themselves and there is the potential reservoir of support and sympathy which they’re trying to mobilize. They regard themselves as the vanguard trying to mobilize support. The reservoir of sympathy may be people who hate them and fear them and hate what they do but nevertheless recognize that there is some justice in their cause. So how do you deal with the two groups? Well the terrorists, you deal with them as with other criminal actions, through police actions, which turns out to be have been quite successful. There has been considerable success in finding leaders, in trying them and breaking up the financing networks.

What about the potential reservoir? Well o­n that again there is strong agreement. What you have to do is ask them what their grievances are. They have grievances, many of them are quite legitimate, so you address those legitimate grievances. I mean that should be done apart from the threat of terror, but just focusing o­n terror, if you address the legitimate grievances that will reduce the ability of the vanguard to mobilize support because it’s based o­n grievances.

On the other hand if you want to help the terrorist then just use violence because that will antagonize and infuriate the reservoir. It will increase recruitment to the terrorist groups, so we have a choice. Either can reduce the threat of terror or we can increase it. This administration and Blair are consciously acting to increase it.

Blair is particularly interesting because the British have just been through this in Northern Ireland. As long as they reacted to IRA terror by increasing violence they stimulated it. As soon as they began, for the first time, to pay some attention to the grievances they were able to reduce it. In fact Belfast is not paradise but it is a lot better than it was ten years ago

As far as I know, every former head of Israeli Military Intelligence and of the general security services has said the same thing: that is if you want to fight terror with violence then you’re asking for an unwinnable war. If you give the people some respect and pay attention to their grievances then you can reach an accommodation, that’s been very generally true.

There’s o­nly o­ne way in which violence works and that’s through extermination, then it works. So take, say, the United States, the United States does not have a lot of internal conflicts and it has a single language over a huge territory and why? It exterminated the native population. If you do that you don’t have any problems, but anything that falls short of extermination or mass expulsion then it’s going to escalate a cycle of violence. It’s always terrible but by now it has become lethal to survival because of our capacity for destruction."

Noam Chomsky