Over the recent years, our world has seen a massive resurgence in terrorist tactics and methodologies. These include airplane hijackings, homemade bombs, suicide bombers, running gunfights in Iraq/Israel/elsewhere, 9/11, the new attacks in Dubai, etc. The question is how do we deal with this? Is it possible to end or seriously curtail the use of such tactics? I personally think that we should look back at the Roman Empire. One city ruled the entire known world, including Islamic, Christian, Jewish and many other areas with different religions. How did they control religious extremists, rebellions and other problems that arose? They allowed people to follow their own religions as long as those religions did not harm the Empire. However, whenever a city or area went into religious rebellion, they struck hard and fast. Since many rebels operated out of cities and it was very difficult to determine where and whom the rebels were, the Romans employed brutal methods, such as randomly slaughtering a multiple of citizens in a city until the citizens of the city themselves threw out the rebels. Sometimes the Romans would even raze an entire city and kill every person living there in order to set an example. This is the only tactic to effectively put down terrorists who can blend in and rise up out of sympathetic populations. The insurgency in Iraq could be ended in a matter of days if the U.S. Army was given permission to issue reprisals every time a soldier was killed. The best way to combat a terror campaign is to issue one of your own. If every time a homemade bomb went off in a certain area and destroyed a Humvee and killed U.S. soldiers, orders were given to randomly bomb a house in that area, the citizens themselves would turn in any terrorists that they had in their midst. If every time we captured a rebel, we killed him and hung his body in the city square I think there would be a drastic reduction in terror campaigns. The same thing goes for any other country that wants to end terror. China already employs these methods effectively (though it keeps them a secret). China has the most oppressive regime in the world; it actively hunts down religious people and imprisons them, political activists are punished harshly. But do you ever hear about terrorists bombing buildings in China? No. Why not? Massive reprisals occur whenever anybody tries anything along those lines. I think we could end the terror campaign in Iraq in a couple of days if we publicly announced very harsh punishments for terror. A suicide bomber would have his entire family and friends killed. Think he will be as willing to die when he knows he will be taking everyone he knows with him? There will be no celebrations by his family after his death, only agonizing pain and death. I know this sounds barbaric and harsh, but we need to move past our politically correct, too sympathetic leanings if we wish to survive and continue to thrive as a civilization.
You're an idiot. CIVILIZATION: a society in an advanced state of social development (e.g., with complex legal and political and religious organizations); "the people slowly progressed from barbarism to civilization"
Don't fool yourself, fool :]. The US only in the last thirty years has started to move away from barbaric practices. During WW2, we had concentration camps for our own citizens. We nuked Japan, killing hundreds of thousands, according to Truman to "save a few thousand American soldiers lives (he later revised this to hundreds of thousands). Our greatest war hero General MacArthur advocated laying a "path of nuclear waste" between Korea and China. In WW1 we used massive amounts of chemical weapons to kill our opponents. Chemical artillery shells killed far more enemy troops than did traditional shells. The north won the Civil War not on the backs of freed slaves as conventional wisdom would have it, but by murdering, raping and burning a massive pathway through the South courtesy of General Sherman. By our modern definitions, these things would be called genocide and the people who did them mass murderers and war criminals. However, these tactics won didn't they?