Innocent westerners have been brutally murdered by a terrorist organization in the Middle East. We have to do something. And so begins another instalment of the "war on terror", looking and sounding an awful lot like a re-run of the past three instalments.
It’s not difficult to foresee that this latest mission will be as counter-productive as the previous ones. Of course some of the bad guys will be killed. But innocent men, women and children will die too, victims of terrorist atrocities, used as human shields, collateral damage in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’ll be over when western public opinion cries enough – that moment could come soon or it could be years away, but we already know that whenever it comes the problem will not have been solved. Instead the next generation of radicalised Islamic youth will be ready for action.
If insanity means doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results, well it’s pretty obvious that the Western response to radicalised Islam is certifiably insane.
Why is the West not ready to try something different? If the US and Europe used their collective military, moral and financial influences to force Israel and Hamas into a compromise for peace, one of the main root causes of Islamic radicalisation would be removed. That would be worth doing but very difficult and would be a hard sale to make to an outraged electorate looking for a quick fix. Easier to throw around some high explosives in northern Iraq and pretend it might achieve something other than more deaths and destruction.
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