Terrorism, a natural phenomenom

Dave Pollards blog, How to Save The World, is almost always a refreshing voice of reason in a world that is often mad with hate, anger, fear, or some other self-preservation mechanism. This week he has a post about how the Londoners got it right in their response to terrorism, and how America is still doing the Ostrich thing.

The only way to prevent terrorists from attacking us is by doing much more to show the billion people who hate us that we care about them, by investing in their schools, their hospitals, their infrastructure, their know-how, and the institutions that, if they could be made to work effectively, would make life for this billion people immeasurably better. That also means we need to respect their culture, as long as it does not harm others, and not impose our culture and values on them.

The is, of course, the only solution. But it will never work in our free-market economy because it is viewed as economic suicide (I don't think it is, but that's how it will be seen). If we raise these people up out of the poverty that hangs over their lives, then those countries and their people will challenge us as economic powers (people will point to India and China here). Or we could chose to see these billion people as an untapped market waiting to get in the game, the game that US Culture currently controls.

Which exposes the one wrench in the monkey works here. Sometimes the mere act of reaching out to offer support is interpreted as an imposition of our culture and values. Especially when we offer support with strings attached (like birth-control restrictions as we currently do).

As Dave says in his article, if the western nations push enough times, we will eventually be pushed back. Whether it is inadvertent or not, we are creating these terrorists as a natural response to our policies.