terrorism

[D-Yes]

Terrorism is the cruellest of crimes. it feeds off the personal suffering by luring governments into actions that abandon hard-earned freedoms of modern civilisation.
Gargantuan budgets committed to security mock the lives lost in poor countries to preventable disease and hunger. The dark complexity of suicide attacks has exposed inadequacies of security forces, moral philosophers, psychologists and theologians alike.
Failing to take advantage of the universal revulsion at the events of September 2001, the "war on terror" has instead magnified the global threat of terrorism.
So, guys what is your opinion towards this issue?
how can we prevent this issue so that everybody can take a peaceful breath and life harmony?

[A Tatar]

There are several elements to your comment.
There is a lot of ambiguity around what is "terrorism". The word is generally to broadly applied. Acts of war strike terror in the hearts of the civilian population but would not be considered terrorism. Rebellions against an occupier such as our own revolution, or the Mau Mau uprising against the Brits in Kenya, as horrific as that was, or the Hungarian uprising against the Soviet Union are not considered acts of terrorism. The Palestinian uprising against its occupiers, on the other hand, in our part of the world is considered an terrorism. But that is another story.

I believe the term terrorism most appropriately should be applied in a case where acts of war are perpetrated on a population that is not in a state of war or an uprising. By that definition, on September 11th we were not at of war, though we and Al-Qeda may not have liked each other. The same can be said of the Spanish train bombings, the bombings in Bali and others throughout the world. One could argue that brutal action against its own population such as the German's slaughter of their Jewish population, or Stalin's annihilation of a million of its Ukrainian population could be called terrorism. But I think there are more appropriate terms such as holocaust and genocide that describe that horror already in use.

As to the "war on terror"; I think you are right in that the global threat is magnified But I think that the declaration of a "war on terror" now identifies us as a combatant nation and maybe in the minds of some justifies acts against us. The fact that we have not had any attacks since 9/11 on our soil suggests that my point may be overstated.

Your point re. the "gargantuan" budget is well taken. During the "cold war" with the Soviets, part of the game was to make the other guy spend money. We would develop a weapons system and the Soviets then would need to develop a system to counter it. If we spent $100,000,000 to develop it and the Soviets spent $90,000,000, they won. If they had to spend $110,000,000, we won. We finally bankrupted them. We have spent a trillion dollars on the war in Iraq, and if indeed it is part of a "war on terror", then we are spending 1 trillion against our foe's several hundred million. This is unsustainable. If we are to continue with the "war on terrorism", we need to figure out some different way that puts our budget closer to a few billion instead of a trillion or somehow get them to need to spend more.
What can we do so everyone can take a peaceful breath? First I think we need to step back and better understand the nature of the conflict. Who is the enemy? We have thrown so many groups into the terrorism kettle, I think we are confusing ourselves. Though Hamas, The IRA, The Basque Separatists, Hisbulah, and Al-Qeda all kill innocent people, as do civilized countries engaged in a war, the aims and strategies of these groups are very different and need to be considered differently.
Having sorted through this and identified the terrorists threatening us, we need to understand them and develop a strategy to destroy them. When I say understand them, I don't mean to understand the rationale behind their actions, because as was the case with the Red Army Faction in Germany in the middle part of last century, I believe the ideology is so radical that it doesn't yield to logic. But better understand how they organize, propagandize finance etc.
If we properly segregate and analyze the terrorists, the group may be much smaller than we think and instead of thinking of and treating them as combatants in a war, we will conclude that they are criminals and pursue them as such. In the long run, crime prevention will be much more effective and cheaper than war.

[eneida1]

Closing the base in Guantanamo that is housing terrorists to me is a mistake because first of all, where is the Obama adminsitration going to house those terrorists? In my opionion , the Obama administration should not close this jail because these terrorists are very dangerous. And to move them to other jails this is very "risky" because they can break out of the jails and terrorize the world again. I live near bases in San Diego and I hope that they don't bring those terrorists to San Diego because they are threat to the community and the whole world and I would not feel safe!. Remember that these terrorists "ideology "is not going to change no matter what the Obama administration does.And we don't want another September eleven to happen! where 3,000 people lost their lives! So the Obama administration should take this into consideration , in which the public safety and interests comes first!.