2/23/05
So you’re trying to combat terrorism... be warned, everyone’s either a fervent critic or a haughty patriot. Coming to any agreement on how best to combat terrorism, when you can’t even partake in a civil discourse, is about as easy as teaching physics to kindergarteners. I’ve heard stories about nightmare Thanksgiving Day dinners due to hostile political talks about the ever so sensitive foreign policy of our leaders. So if you can get passed the difficulties of forming a plan to combat terrorism, your doing pretty well as far as I can tell.
Once you have a plan, you actually have to implement that plan in a way that will win support of the world body. So far, the United States doesn’t look to be doing so swell. This would make it easier, because you would have a lot more help, more funding and a lot less criticism. But even if you can absorb the harsh criticism from numerous other countries and shoulder the burden yourself, you still have to keep the faith of those that you want to help. To successfully implement your plan, it takes believers. People must believe in your plan and execute with the courage that their faith in your plan gives them. Otherwise, you have a shell of a movement and are doomed to fail. Those who you rely on to follow your plan will give up hope of succeeding and fall short of the goal. There are other motivating factors that can be used such as fear, greed and lies; but I wouldn’t sponsor any of these for ethical reasons and the fact that those are very short term solutions that don’t endure the same as inspiration.
By now, you would have been successful with the previous steps. First you formed a plan that will be undoubtedly full of debate, outrage and compromise. Second you were able to effectively establish the ground work needed to implement your plan. You’ve been able to ride out through some trying times and been able to fund the efforts and kept the faith of those who you rely on to follow through with your orders. Now you have to keep it up and break the opposition's own inspiration. Your enemy also has been driven by a plan that they believe in. If you’re lucky, you will have exposed that your intentions are purer than your enemy’s. Hopefully, at that point that you will have won the hearts of those that you are battling (if you believe that human nature is inherently pure).
It is hard to combat terrorism because it doesn’t exist in superficial form. You can’t just expose of it. It’s a living part of those who believe in its power. They believe that the ends justify the means. The challenge for you is to expose there are better ways of achieving the result (or a compromised version of the result) that the terrorists want to achieve. Be convincing that your way of life is justified, while the terrorists are flawed. To accomplish this, you must reach across barriers of distrust, culture, religion and wealth, and do so with an elaborate and daunting plan that requires proper execution, over and over again. No sweat!