Counter-Radicalization: Tackling Emotions to Tackle Terrorism

On some holidays, like New Year's Day and the 4th of July, yea.
I knew that he had a potential for nuking us
on little boats, as thay approach our harbors. That can be annoying.



NUCLEAR BOMS, yea. Call me superstitious.


I don t care about that,
but I have been reliably advised that if I arrived at your airport
with my defensive guns, I 'd have trouble from your legal authorities;
something about being "declared to be a terrorist."
Its easier to spend my cash elsewhere.




No. Those r just trivialities.
I just care about use of WMDs.
Note that my sense of security IMPROVED IMMEASURABLY
when W overthrew Saddam, and he ran for his life (un-successfully).

That was good for a chuckle.





David

Unbelievable.

Rich Hall hit it right on the head, after all.......

From about the 3 min 30 mark.

That is a dilemma for counter-radicalization programs that is being taken seriously. In the United States these programs are coordinated closely with communities who have expressed concern about members being recruited to join known terrorist groups. In Sweden and Germany, the EXIT organization only attempts to de-radicalize individuals who contact them first (individuals seeking to leave neo-nazi groups).

Saddam fought Al Kada and kept his country fairly stable. His government had problems but if that fuken Bushes government would have minded its own business it wouldent have created the IS. He and his merry band of idiots are directly responsible for IS. And the resurgence of Al Kada. Yes I know I am misspelling it.

If we had not overthrown Saddam,
then his son woud have taken over.
He was crazier than Saddam. I 'm very happy to have seen end of his dynasty.

Thanks be unto W.





David

I don't believe discerning posters are concerned regarding your spelling, Rabel; I am highly interested in the substance of your post which finds me in total agreement.

Saddam Hussein had the Iraqi warring ethnic factions afraid of him....this fear controlled the political divisions.....they were afraid Hussein might use chemical nerve gas on them. In November 1980, two months into the Iran–Iraq War, the first reported use of Nerve gas agents killed about 20,000 Iranian soldiers immediately, and the world did nothing to the Iraqi dictator, and in fact, right after that Donald Rumsfeld was seen shaking Hussein's hand as Iraq was the US dear ally even though he had used nerve gas on the Iranians and the Kurds.

Once the GWB administration illegally invaded Iraq, the nation became destabilize, the warring factions were free to fight each other to the death. The Bush administration dismissed Iraqi soldiers, leaving them free to join forces along with others to oust the Americans and grab control of Iraq. There were over 4,489 US military casualties in Iraq under GWB. If, as your post stresses, Iraq had not been invaded and the structure which kept the ethnic factions in place had not been shattered, there would be no ISIL aka IS aka ISI today which is having global repercussions.

You don't let things like facts stand in the way of your unreasoning paranoia do you. Saddam Hussein enjoyed the almost absolute power he had in his own fiefdom. He went along with America all the way up until Kuwait, and even then it's been said that he thought America wouldn't mind if he annexed the emirate.

He was a gangster, not a fanatic, he enjoyed the privileges of almost absolute power, he wouldn't willingly jeopardise that by attacking America and hastening his own demise.

IS, on the other hand, are fanatics they'll quite happily use nukes or any other WMD if they get their hands on it.

Dubya's decision to invade Iraq was a mistake of monstrous proportions, not only that it was badly thought out and terribly executed. We will all be dealing with the fall out for generations.

Many of the countries being mentioned here are not ready for what we call "democracy" yet...and when they finally are, the movement toward it will come from within...not be imposed from those on the outside.

As several have already noted, our move in Iraq was horrendous. A strongman (or strongwomen, for that matter) is what is needed to keep an artificial entity like Iraq solid. Saddam Hussein was doing that.

No tears spent seeing him hang...but his removal from power may have moved us in this dangerous direction we seem headed. (I acknowledge, as someone mentioned in a different thread, that history does not give us evidence of what might have been if an alternative had been allowed.)

No matter how hard it is in the West to accept this, dictatorships ARE more efficient than democracies...or representative democracies. They can get things done...and provide more "cement"...than getting a working consensus in a democracy.

We are screwed right now...and there is no reasonable screwdriver handy to unscrew us.

Happy September 16, Rabel.

As a continuation of my last post, I must add, the US broke Iraq and it is morally incumbent on America to fix it, despite Obama's campaign pledge to pull out of GWB's wars. (I must say Obama is doing everything towards this end with a newly installed government in Iraq.) Everything must be done to right the situation in Iraq which was stable,* despite the first Gulf war under the senior Bush to run Hussein out of Kuwait. Saddam Hussein had in place a system that worked.....keeping the Iraqi ethics, Shia Arabs, Sunni Arabs, and Kurds, who hated each other, under control.....Iraq, for the most part, was stable. How we wish those days were here again! This is what happens when unqualified persons of GWB's mental calibre, mixed with unscrupulous, sinister greedy individuals like Dick Cheney, is in total power of the US.

When first planning their agenda to invade Iraq, the GWB cabinet consulted one of their own, 5-star General Colin Powell, who alerted them: "If you break Iraq you will own it." Those words fell on seemingly deaf ears. The only thing Cheney, the de facto president of the US could see was profiteering of the many oil wells in Iraq. Behind this (Dick Cheney, VP's scheme) were the neo-cons, the pro-Israeli lobby in the United States to benefit Israel, and to elevate the Zionist nation to a very important position in the Middle East, as a part of a plan to achieve overall US middle east control; they had planned to invade Iran, and reshape the middle east more to Israel's liking in a neighborhood which refused to be dominated by the Israeli IDF.

The myriad groups in the middle east hating the US has evolved into one particularly more venomous force called ISI or ISIL which was once a part of Osama bin-Ladin's al-Qaeda. If the US had never illegally invaded Iraq, I sincerely doubt there would have been a need for an ISIL to come into being because most people in Iraq had learned to live with Hussein's rules, and at least they had a home and were not refugees being killed en masse.

Have a good day, friend.
___________

*There are some politicians in the US screaming the Arabs are begging the US to put boots on the ground to help them save themselves from their own mess! To this I say, the Arabs did not break Iraq which consequently brought into being ISI.....GWB administration did. This is Bush/Cheney's work, the aftermath which will be with us for a very long time.

Thanks for a serious reply. I was wondering how Hemingway would have reacted to the idea of de-radicalizing him after the Spanish civil war... To be a radical is not a crime.

It is if it causes you to behead aid workers.

What we're talking about is a particular offshoot of Islam, condemned by the mainstream that picks on vulnerable young people very much like a cult. It's destructive and goes against most western, (and Islamic) values.

We'll, not really. What is a crime is to behead an aid worker (or anyone else).

I know Islamism well, have hung around with Islamists a lot, and I agree it is a dangerous ideology. But the same can be said of communism or even Zionism. I think the west should be careful not to outlaw some ideologies but not others... It's a slippery slope.

It's not outlawing it, it's trying to steer people away. There's a world of difference between fundamentalists, (most of whom are from a highly religious background,) and potential terrorists, (most of whom are new converts or people who didn't take their faith that seriously.)

It's about dealing with (mostly,) angry young men.

We're not outlawing ideaologies.

But when those ideaologies get severely warped and mass murders are the result, then I have no problem with going in hard after the murderers.

Do you?

Agree.


Clockwork orange comes to mind. When I was an angry young man, no amount of preaching moderation would have helped... Anyway, if you find an effective way to do it, pray tell.

When you were an angry young man did you commit terrorist atrocities?

Did u just imply that u favor communism ??

None that I am aware of. However, some of the servicemen who fought in Afghanistan or Iraq did... But theirs were 'acceptable' atrocities, killing only Afghans or Arabs, which might be why they are not requested to 'de-radicalize'. And before them, the guys who gravitated around the Italian Red Brigades, the German Red Army, the French Action Directe, the IRA, the Basques separatists, etc, they committed or were accessories to terrorist atrocities. And yet no one ever asked them to de-radicalise.

Ideas cannot be fought by military or clinical means. They can only be fought by other ideas. If the West was less morally bankrupt, it would be in a better position to fight on the front of ideas.

Killing communists was a pretty GOOD IDEA.





David

Olivier5,

Counter-radicalization is focused on violent extremism rather than pure ideology. The UK Prevent program works in cooperation with people who share Islamist ideology but reject violent tactics.