Iraq's impact on Terrorism

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This had no or negative effects on terrorism. Studies have shown that poverty doesn't have a strong correlation to terrorism; totalitarianism and a lack of freedom does have a stronger correlation. So the root cause of evil is hatred -- and hatred/anger is most often because people feel they have no control (no say in what is happening), no future (because of lack of education/financial opportunities), no hope. If you want to stop terrorism (or weaken it), you have to give people hope, and give them a say in their government; freedom. We can debate if we were successful, but fighting to end a despot didn't hurt us with Iraqi's, but it drew all those with terrorist tendencies out in the open and attacking us. It exposed the problem, not created it.

The argument that “democracy can’t be forced on a country” is wrong; it has been successfully many times. Talk to the Japanese.

It won’t always work, but the status quo may be worse. And democracy is far from utopia, but far better than the alternative which is washing your hands of their problems, and exploiting them and helping to keep them down. So the issue is about the path you choose. Switzerland's approach to ethics is “since we can't stop it we should profit from it, and thus aid it in the process”. Would you say that is a moral view: if you helped a murderer or rapist for blood money, either by action or inaction. Yet when a country (or all of Europe) does the same to Iraq, many people defend the action. Interesting subjective ethics if you ask me.

Most Americans fundamentally understand this and choose change over sponsoring an evil status quo.

Of course if we'd held the European philosophy, we would not have gotten involved in WWII or any of the other places that the Europeans or rest of the world has wanted our help. So people that claim that Americans are more aggressive, or have started this attitude under Bush ignore the last century of history.

As for has this war helped or not? We’ll know in 5 or 10 years. But facts are facts. Short term they stopped attacking us in the U.S. The terrorsists have a better chance of hurting us on or near their home turf; so now instead of our civilians dieing at home, they are attacking our military abroad. The results have been a more secure U.S. That’s not a complete loss.

Thanks to Bush we have a better situation in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iran and Iraq. We stand a better chance of fixing things long term in Korea and Iraq -- but it takes time rebuilding. While the poor Iraqi’s are bearing the brunt of the terrorism, the world is seeing what the terrorists are standing for and it isn’t freedom from op- pression or that they want opportunity; they’re fighting democracy and freedom and for tyranny, anarchy and poverty because those are things that feed terrorism. But now instead of Saddam and Iraq helping them and sponsoring them, we have the majority of the Iraqi people fighting them and helping us. That’s a win too. 14 of the 18 provinces in Iraq are mostly peaceful; it is only the press and the ignorant that fo- cus exclusively on the other 4. Look at how much better things are in the rest of the nation which rejects terrorism.

Instead of a band of terrorist sponsoring nations stretching from the Mediterranean sea to Afghanistan, we have Iran surrounded by freer countries, we have Syria’s sup- ply route from Iran cut off, we have a presence in the middle east, and we have ter- rorist sponsoring regimes scared and making noise because they are scared.

Iraqi’s don’t necessarily like us or being occupied or the price of war, but they do un- derstand the alternatives; and in 10 or 20 years, we’ll see whether it worked as well as WWII did. But Democracies tend not to attack other democracies; we’re hoping this truism applies in the middle east. We don’t know if we can win, or the Iraqi’s will win, but this is a far better chance of making a long term difference than the al- ternative. So we try. Most of the worst case scenarios are still better than what we/ they had. So I don’t see how any rational person can say this was a complete loss==