Imagine you are the leader of a strong nation, and you have a choice to make. Serious terrorist attacks have been made against your country, and the nation harboring these terrorists refuses to co-operate with law enforcement. Would you... 1. Bring economic sanctions against that nation, even though it would cause considerable suffering to innocent civilians including children. 2. Attempt to assassinate that nation's leadership, causing civil war and yet more considerable suffering to innocent civilians including children. Number one is legal under international law...the second is not.
It depends. If I was Tsar Putin I was just do whatever I wanted to, hopefully killing as many enemy citizens as possible, and get away with it because the Western media and NATO are retarded. If I was Obama I would probably just commit national suicide or else deploy tanks against my own citizens like the last Democrat President.
Diplomatic channels should always be explored before you engage in exstreme meassures. So it woul be door number 1. But history has shown us time and again, that sometimes a line must be drawn. So if you want to lead, you must do it by example, and not because your the strongest force around. Your desisions, will always reflect back on you, and the world is not "black or white".
bullshit, the taliban asked for proof that binladan was behind it the same as any other country would before extroditing one of there citizans. what did bush do? he threw the worlds largest temper tantrum and 1000's have died because of it
Scenarios like the one you present Carcano, have no certified solution. We saw it in Lebanon, Libya, Somali and in Afghanistan right now. But in 2 of the cases, time and diplomacy, have been very helpfull. In any case, every nation has its right to self defense. The scenario you present has no clear solution, the world is not "Black or White"
I agree...but we're not talking about any specific nation, only the principles involved that one could apply to many situations.
Stop right there. What do you define as "serious terrorist attacks?" I'm not sure which country you're referring to. Mine has suffered one terrorist attack in the past seven years, and although it startled the nation, the 3,000 people it killed are insignificant compared to the 150,000 people who have been killed by drunk drivers in those same seven years. Or the 300,000 people who have been killed in all road accidents. I suggest that a reasonable measure of the "seriousness" of any cause of death is to compare it to road accidents, since they are one of the top four or five causes of death everywhere in the world, even places like lawless Iraq and medicine-deprived Africa. If the death rate from terrorist attacks in this country you're talking about isn't at least ten percent of the death toll from road accidents, then you should just ignore it. My rationale is that no country on earth really takes road accidents seriously and they practically ignore drunk driving. If they were serious about it, for about $150 per car they could install a breathalyzer ignition interlock in all of them. So they must really not care about all those deaths. Therefore if terroists kill a lot fewer people than drunk drivers, by definition it is a completely unimportant threat, and the only logical conclusion is that it should be ignored.
That would be a death toll of 30,000 by your figures. I doubt any government could get away with ignoring that kind of magnitude.
The difference is that the number of car accidents accumulate over time, whereas for a terrorist atack were talking just one isolated attack. If on car accident cost 30,000 lives all at once, then Im sure the govrnment would be galvanized into action. You're comparing apples to oranges (forgive the cliche Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!)
The annual total of traffic deaths in your country is 300,000? Or are you referring to the seven-year total in the USA? Let's accept your assertion for the sake of argument. In that case, how about five percent of the number of people killed by drunk drivers? That would be 1,000 people per year or 7,000 in seven years, which is more than twice the number of people who have been killed by terrorists. In just the month of September 2001, 1800 Americans were killed by drunk drivers. That is a comparable figure. I suppose one could say that our government has been "galvanized" into action on the drunk driving issue, which is to say that they have enacted some highly visible programs that inconvenience everyone but don't actually address the problem. Sobriety checkpoints are notorious for stopping everyone but the drunks, who know where they are. The people they catch are the ones who have had one drink too many, realize it, and are compensating by driving more cautiously than everyone else and are not a danger to anyone. If the government were serious about drunk driving, they could mandate breathalyzer ignition interlocks in all new cars and give five years to retrofit old ones, the same thing they did with pollution control devices back in the 1960s. That would cost very little--a total of ten or twenty billion dollars, the equivalent of a few months in Iraq. Of course it would interfere with the recreation of all the politicians, judges, lawyers and cops who routinely drive drunk so there's no hope for it. This is the same way our government was "galvanized" into action after 9/11. The culprits were the Saudis: Most of the hijackers were Saudis, the operation was planned by Saudis and funded by Saudi money, most of the funding for terrorist training camps throughout the Muslim world comes from Saudi Arabia, and Osama is a member by marriage of the Saudi royal family. If Bush had threatened to bomb Riyadh, King Abdullah (who surely knows where Osama is, nobody believes the denials of a despot) would have delivered Osama's head to the White House via FedEx Overnight. But his puppeteers in the energy industry wouldn't tolerate a threat against their Saudi colleagues. So he tried to convince us that the hapless people of Afghanistan (ruled by the Taliban, the Cold War creation of President Carter) and Iraq (the only secular, pro-Western country in the entire Middle East) had something to do with 9/11 and he bombed their capitals instead. The U.S. government is good at lying and passably competent at Grand Gestures, but they are morons when it comes to risk analysis and risk management. Lightning and bee stings together killed almost a thousand Americans in the past seven years--a comparable order of magnitude to terrorism. Nobody even worries about those risks. But we've squandered the international sympathy we had after 9/11 and incurred the wrath of more than a billion Muslims in order to pursue a "war on terrorism" that will very likely make it worse.
Perhaps that would stop them from offending others. If criminals had a income that could support them , they just might not be criminals to begin with.
Thousands of accidents and a singular pre-meditated violent terrorist attack are not at all comparable... except they both involve counting dead bodies. Installing breathalyzer devices in cars would cause a mass revolt as everyone would be inconvenienced. Far more effective would be to permanently suspend licenses. Just think, that way Bush would never have come to power, as no ones going to elect a guy who isnt even fit to drive a car...never mind commandeer an entire nation. Bush had his license suspended in his youth at least twice. He was a drunken lout who failed at every enterprise...until he found Jesus! Now he just murders hundreds of thousands of people for no apparent reason. Oliver Stone just came out with a new film about GWB's early life. Heres the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEyJ2kdaaTQ
