Re:Martyrs and Atrocities

Laserlight wrote:

> If you regard your citizens as expendable, you have a lot of options.
> I understand Syria is teaching its kids, in school, that being a
> martyr is a great thing and walking into an Israeli building or street
> with a dynamite vest counts for making you a martyr.	Okay,
> maybe--maybe!--a lot of the young impressionable kids who hear this
> from authority figures on a regular basis still won't go along with
> it, but what if one tenth of one percent of one year's worth of
> schoolchildren believe and are willing to act on it?	Okay, now to be
> a little more organized, say you ask for volunteers to be carry a
> biowar package into Washington, or a suitcase nuke into Norfolk?
> Think you might find one? 

> Now let's take a militant government and send recruiters and Special
> Forces troopers and Republican Guards and so forth, visiting every
> grade in every school once a month.  Instead of football and
> basketball, promote ROTC as fervently.  Think you'd  get enough
> volunteers?
> 
> (Not that the Islamic Federation would do _any_ of this.  Really).

This is extrememly plausible. In fact, it's a wonder that it hasn't
happened yet.

(The last time I used the above statement was to an DIA friend of mine
just before the Aum cult used GB in Tokyo, when we were discussing
extremist biowar attacks on the COMPUSERVE military forum.)

What's the defence? Pretty much what we're doing now. Some checks at
borders to prevent it being a "no-brainer", and the implied threat that
if it happens, to paraphrase Admiral Halsey, "Arabic will be a language
spoken only in Hell."

To people who value their children's lives so lightly, such a threat is
much more plausible than to us. We PROBABLY wouldn't launch a war of
extermination using Nukes in profusion on civilian targets (only). But
they couldn't be as sure of this as we are. And they're certainly not
sure that the Ol Debbil CIA won't go putting multi-billion-dollar prices
on the heads (just the heads...) of the people who gave the orders. Come
to think of it, I'm not sure of that one myself... Oh yes, and execution
via the electric chair is looked upon by many outside the US as being
"Death by Torture", comparable with burning at the stake.

"Let's see... if you order this, your family will be raped and killed by
hired gunmen, and you yourself will be fried slowly on an electric
chair, probably after several failed attempts to stop your heart. During
these attempts, your hair will catch fire, your skin will blacken, but
you won't be dead. And there's a possibility that everyone you've ever
known will be instantly burnt to charcoal beforehand. Have a nice day."

The big problem is finding out who's responsible. But as the USA has
shown, it really doesn't care too much. So X plants a bomb in a US
target, and Y gets the retaliation (or vice versa). Even when this is
found out, the US public doesn't care as it's last month's news, and the
rest of the world just wonders why the US doesn't bomb the bejasus out
of all of them on principle. Such a cavalier attitude is a great
deterrent - even your friends won't give you support as they might get
nuked in the backlash.

(For those who might be offended by the above statement about US
attention-span, let me first apologise, then ask how many bombs hit Iraq
yesterday, and how many the day before that? Because this isn't News any
more, it's just information. BTW I have no idea myself, either.)  
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