My Plan
Sorry everyone, it has been a long time since I last blogged. Good news is that the move to Marshalltown is complete and next week I can begin work in the classroom.
Before getting into the main idea of my blog, I would like to quickly review Mr. and Mrs. Smith which I saw tonight. Not totally what I expected from previews, a couple more twists than I thought there would be, but overall I liked it. Lots of action and lots of little funny scences. The whole idea of two assassins married to each other is original and I would recommend the movie.
Now...onto today's news. I woke up this morning and in my first ten minutes of being awake and watching the news I heard that the little girl from Charles City that had been missing was found dead AND that London had been attacked by terrorists with a series of subway bombs...at that point it was definately time to go to work.
After work and listening to more stories about the bombings and what this all means I started thinking. What really got me thinking was Anderson Cooper's 360 show tonight. My sister loves that show and I happened to catch a couple stories. One was done awhile ago but dealt with safety at U.S. train/subway stations. In the story they left a backpack just sitting there to see how long it was before a cop/security checked it out. 20 minutes in Philly, NEVER in NYC. The producer just ended up grabbing the bag instead of waiting for someone to check it out. They then interviewed the police chief in NYC. He said that he wouldn't say another attack within the U.S. was "inevitable," but did say that we are open for attacks because government can't assure us safety everywhere. EVERYWHERE is pretty broad, but the preamble of the U.S. Constitution does say that in our "more perfect union," we will be provided a "common defense."
I know that we have a military and they do provide a common defense. A couple problems here though. 1) There are lots of safety gaps all over in our country, and 2) Recruitment in the armed services is dropping because of the fear of being sent to Iraq. It is becoming more apparent that Iraq is a mess (no WMD, no connection to 9/11, no exit plan) and that Afghanistan (the one I did agree with orginally) is still flooded with members of the Taliban. Obviously if we just packed up and left, it would be a mess. I say, start to pull troops out slowly...and to continue fighting terrorism (and hopefully gain more recruits) give these courageous young men and women jobs as security at our nation's airports, train stations, borders, etc. I don't want to sound like it would be a military state, but it would be like another branch of defense that is simply good, abled men and women working as security. Kinda like a National Guard without the military uniforms and what-not. NYC's police chief said there weren't enough guards/etc., so we use our "civilian" army. These people would be given the same benefits as troops, like money for school/etc. As for Iraq and Afghanistan, like I said, we pull out slowly. We continue to do our job there and get the Iraqi and Afghani people to fight for themselves.
I was saddened this morning by the news of the London bombings. I send my thoughts and prayers to them. Right afterwards we started hearing the old rhetoric of "we will hunt these barbarians down and do justice to them." Yeah, just like we did with Osama. Let's face it, a War on Terror CANNOT be fought by invading countries. Terror is NOT a country. It is not Iraq, Saudi Arabia, etc. This is a group of people from all over, probably some within the U.S., that we are fighting. Here is how we fight them. We solve our security issues here. We beef up our intelligence with the money saved from not fighting wars in places like Iraq (can anyone say 1 billion a day?) and we team up with other countries' intelligence communities. We fight with covert operations (if we know where Osama is, just drop some troops in quick and get him, it isn't like we've never done this before). Finally, we fight financially. We know, or would know with good intell., where a lot of this money is coming from that funds terror groups. Freeze it, take it, call out those countries like Saudi Arabia that send government money to terror groups. Play Hardball without the nukes or weapons. It can be done, instead we insist on not stepping on the toes of Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. For as tough as Bush acts, he is a real weeny. His answer would just be to invade a country that had little or nothing to do with 9/11. Bin Laden is reportedly in Pakistan, but we don't want to upset them any. If they know we mean business (money, aid, etc.) we can get what we want. A War on Terror is unwinnable the way we are fighting, cause even if we do succeed here or there we never know we win.
Before getting into the main idea of my blog, I would like to quickly review Mr. and Mrs. Smith which I saw tonight. Not totally what I expected from previews, a couple more twists than I thought there would be, but overall I liked it. Lots of action and lots of little funny scences. The whole idea of two assassins married to each other is original and I would recommend the movie.
Now...onto today's news. I woke up this morning and in my first ten minutes of being awake and watching the news I heard that the little girl from Charles City that had been missing was found dead AND that London had been attacked by terrorists with a series of subway bombs...at that point it was definately time to go to work.
After work and listening to more stories about the bombings and what this all means I started thinking. What really got me thinking was Anderson Cooper's 360 show tonight. My sister loves that show and I happened to catch a couple stories. One was done awhile ago but dealt with safety at U.S. train/subway stations. In the story they left a backpack just sitting there to see how long it was before a cop/security checked it out. 20 minutes in Philly, NEVER in NYC. The producer just ended up grabbing the bag instead of waiting for someone to check it out. They then interviewed the police chief in NYC. He said that he wouldn't say another attack within the U.S. was "inevitable," but did say that we are open for attacks because government can't assure us safety everywhere. EVERYWHERE is pretty broad, but the preamble of the U.S. Constitution does say that in our "more perfect union," we will be provided a "common defense."
I know that we have a military and they do provide a common defense. A couple problems here though. 1) There are lots of safety gaps all over in our country, and 2) Recruitment in the armed services is dropping because of the fear of being sent to Iraq. It is becoming more apparent that Iraq is a mess (no WMD, no connection to 9/11, no exit plan) and that Afghanistan (the one I did agree with orginally) is still flooded with members of the Taliban. Obviously if we just packed up and left, it would be a mess. I say, start to pull troops out slowly...and to continue fighting terrorism (and hopefully gain more recruits) give these courageous young men and women jobs as security at our nation's airports, train stations, borders, etc. I don't want to sound like it would be a military state, but it would be like another branch of defense that is simply good, abled men and women working as security. Kinda like a National Guard without the military uniforms and what-not. NYC's police chief said there weren't enough guards/etc., so we use our "civilian" army. These people would be given the same benefits as troops, like money for school/etc. As for Iraq and Afghanistan, like I said, we pull out slowly. We continue to do our job there and get the Iraqi and Afghani people to fight for themselves.
I was saddened this morning by the news of the London bombings. I send my thoughts and prayers to them. Right afterwards we started hearing the old rhetoric of "we will hunt these barbarians down and do justice to them." Yeah, just like we did with Osama. Let's face it, a War on Terror CANNOT be fought by invading countries. Terror is NOT a country. It is not Iraq, Saudi Arabia, etc. This is a group of people from all over, probably some within the U.S., that we are fighting. Here is how we fight them. We solve our security issues here. We beef up our intelligence with the money saved from not fighting wars in places like Iraq (can anyone say 1 billion a day?) and we team up with other countries' intelligence communities. We fight with covert operations (if we know where Osama is, just drop some troops in quick and get him, it isn't like we've never done this before). Finally, we fight financially. We know, or would know with good intell., where a lot of this money is coming from that funds terror groups. Freeze it, take it, call out those countries like Saudi Arabia that send government money to terror groups. Play Hardball without the nukes or weapons. It can be done, instead we insist on not stepping on the toes of Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. For as tough as Bush acts, he is a real weeny. His answer would just be to invade a country that had little or nothing to do with 9/11. Bin Laden is reportedly in Pakistan, but we don't want to upset them any. If they know we mean business (money, aid, etc.) we can get what we want. A War on Terror is unwinnable the way we are fighting, cause even if we do succeed here or there we never know we win.
posted by CKG at
11:19 PM
2 Comments:
Some interesting thoughts on "solutions" to Iraq, Osama and the world's terrorists, CKG....
While I wouldn't disagree with your overall theme of "let's try something different, because what we're doing now doesn't seem to be working" (please correct me if I am paraphrasing incorrectly), I don't think ANY (electable) politician has the guts and/or gumption to follow through with your plan. Republican or Democrat, it would take an awful lot of convincing of the American people (not to mention Congress) to transfer our entire personnell and financial focus to domestic affairs. I'd be interested to hear a more detailed plan on how all of this would come about....
By
Matt Townsley, At
9:45 PM
That may be the problem though matt, none of our "leaders" are willing to take a risk and fight in a different way.
I was listening to a radio show (can't think of which one right now) but the point was brought up that fighting in Iraq was just the simple way out when dealing with terrorism. Rather than thinking about what should be done, we just hastily went to Iraq.
By
CKG, At
3:20 PM
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