REVENGE PARIS

Was what happened in Paris last night an act of terror or an act of war? In my opinion, the way you answer that question tells a lot about your basic political philosophy. I remember thinking how stupid it was after 9/11 when the now-infamous President George W. Bush declaring “war on terrorism”. It made no logical sense to declare war on a technique or method. The consequences of calling it a war soon became clear in Iraq. A small group of men organized what the media called an “attack on America”. In Paris, an even smaller group organized an “attack on France”. Now we have eight dead people to attack and a multi-million man military led by a heroic President of France ready to attack them. The proper thing to do against a war attack is to organize a military response. We visualize armies, air forces, and navies heroically engaged in pitch battles, guided by the hand of “God”, doing the right thing to protect our families and our homeland against the forces of evil. We can exemplify this kind of thinking by the expression, “the glories of war.” Oh my God, how bestial can we become? Of course, we cannot ignore the fact that humankind harbors evil. This means that we have to have police as a force of good to act on our behalf in protecting us. At one time in my life, I remember talking to a group of semi-automatic rifle carrying military as they came out of the jungle of Belize. They were Belize Defense Force, all dressed in camouflage. They had been tracking down, capturing, and sometimes killing, Guatemalans who had been entered the forests of Belize to steal natural resources such as timber and xate. One fellow among them stood out because he was dressed in blue. When I asked, why he was there he responded that he was the police. He went on to explain he could arrest and search the people the soldiers captured meaning that was something the army could not do. That simple exchange explained to me the difference between the military versus police. A soldier can kill an enemy, but he cannot search him. We, as a civilization, have drawn lines of behavior such as this. Of course, military and police behavior overlaps; nevertheless, there is an ingrained difference in the manner we as a society treat group conflict versus the manner we treat individual conflict. Eight people in Paris attacked several restaurants. It was not at all like Germany attacking France or Japan attacking the United States. The attack in Paris and against the World Trade Centers attack were acts of terrorism and not acts of war and we, as a nation, should respond accordingly. Police can do the things that we have to do that the military cannot do. For example, Osama bin Laden was a Saudi living in Afghanistan and was following an Egyptian cleric who was preaching radical beliefs practiced by a very small minority of the 1.2 billion Muslim people from around the world. The Paris attack involves French-born citizens, with religious roots in many different sovereign nations in the Middle East. Whom and what exactly do we attack with the air force, army, and navy that the certain political leaders such as Lindsey Graham and John McCain want to build spending money we do not have? Following the attacks in Paris, what we hear on the media is that the president of France called the attacks “an act of war”. What he is saying is that the world’s armed forces have to attack a techniques use by eight people following an ideology. Just as we should have asked Bush, we should ask President Hollande, precisely whom do we attack and where do we carry out this attack? Maybe he can make up a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction somewhere. Don’t we have to do a lot of international police work to find out? Isn’t it obvious Interpol is better equipped to do this than the military? URL: firetreepub.blogspot.com Comments Invited and not moderated