A New Direction in the GWoT©

I don't post as much as I used to over at DailyKos (though I give it a look daily). When I first started blogging Kos was a great place to try out my writing chops, get feedback, and develop my own voice. And it still serves as a great place to get a feel for up-to-the-second progressive thought. But too much of the discussion there is of the echo chamber variety to be useful for a real clash of ideas.

So, for a while now your CaliBlogger has been of late wandering about the web. One of the best places for relatively reasonable discussion is over at Joe Gandelman's site, The Moderate Voice which, incredibly, attracts posters from both the right and left.

In light of the recent clashes between Israel and Hezbollah, the UK transatlantic plot, and the unending undercurrent of disaster in Iraq, the discussions over at TMV have been, shall we say, quite lively.

One recent discussion questions whether it would be fruitful to re-examine some of our assumptions about fighting terror.

And though too extensive navel-gazing can have a deleterious effect, paralysis by analysis, given the continued threat of terror, and our relative inability to do much about it 5 years after 9/11, perhaps it would be wise to wonder whether the apparent flaws in our current efforts are based on incorrect assumptions about the nature of the threat.

One of the major mistakes I believe BushCorp™ makes, at least in its public statements, is the conflation of all those who use the tactics of terror, when it seems to me that most of the groups using such tactics have, each of them, unique characteristics which need to be addressed in different ways.

An Iraqi Shi'ite who blows himself up at an Iraqi Sunni funeral has, I would posit, very different motivations than a British national of Pakistani descent who conspires to blow up a transatlantic airliner.

As has been said over and over again, terror is a tactic, not an ideology.

Continuously portraying the Glorious War on Terror© as a fight against that monolithic bogeyman, the terrorist, may be good for electing Republicans, but it deludes the public as to the true, diffucult and multi-faceted problems we are facing around the globe.

I strongly suspect that truly addressing the threats posed by those who use terror as a tactic can not be addressed by the neo-con's grand imperial schemes, neither can it be eliminated building a wall around Fortress America.