Osama bin Laden is a parlor game compared to Adolf Hitler's "Final Solution," but people keep making the comparison anyway. Please, stop belittling the man's unholy horrors that brought the world to its knees by comparing him to a bunch of rag tag guerrilla fighters who lack what was at the time, the world's most advanced killing machine.
Seems like GW decided to drop the "appeasement" word about negotiating with terrorists (and sovereign states) and once again reduced Adolf Hitler, the still reigning king of misery and Godlessness, to these two-bit, run and gun Jihadis who are basically deadly mosquitoes hoping to poke and blow up enough holes into the west to force a slow bleeding death, then allow it to collapse on it's own nuclear tipped sword.
Because we have to help Osama destroy our own empire. He doesn't have the man power alone to do it. He has to get us to spending our capital and acting a damn fool. This is passive-aggressive warfare, not the kind of war we were built to create. The military we created to defeat Hitler.
Hitler's strategy was to invade your country and methodically, categorically and painstakingly kill every Jewish person (plus gypsies, homosexuals and the mentally handicapped) he could get a hand on. Killing people was a science for Hitler. The Nazis, quite possibly the most banal, anal evil geniuses in history, turned genocide into industry. They kept records of every individual down to the number of head lice on their head. And the size of those head lice.
Now you and I would think, why count head lice on people you're either going to work to death in death camps or just starve to death in concentration camps. But the Nazis were special. If they were going to massacre people they wanted it to have that classic German efficiency about it.
At the time of World War II the Germans had the most advanced military in the world. Not us for damn sure. Not the British. Not the Russians. They had the technology. That's why the Allies were getting slaughtered in the beginning. And there was no dealing with the German populace. The Nazis were elected to power. They had a country. They believed God was on their side. They believed their way was the right and only way. They were creating the master race and they were instituting the final solution.
And we're comparing these people, these head-lice accountants of systematic murder to al-Qaida.
I don't know how many times I can say this: Stop insulting Hitler. Hitler almost took over all of Europe and was planning an invasion of the United States. And he would have pulled if off if he were so greedy. If he hadn't been so obsessed with the banal. With genocide and with bleeding his country dry in not wanting to admit defeat.
Saddam Hussein was NOT Hitler. Kim Jong Il is NOT Hitler. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is NOT Hitler. No one since Hitler has come close to Hitler. Millions, millions of people died in World War II because of the Nazis and Hitler. People died in the Middle East, Northern Africa, Asia, the Pacific, Europe, America and Eurasia. He did more than capture some decimated dust bowl like the Taliban took Afghanistan (which al-Qaeda took safe haven in). Hitler took fucking France! He took Poland! He took what he wanted and he occupied what he desired. He was building an empire for the Third Reich. One that was supposed to last lifetimes.
Al-Qaeda can only daydream of such might so they are trying to break our will and break us financially. They are not coming in Sherman tanks and a fleet of ships. They are not coming with Russian MiGs or advance rocket fire. That's our shit and if al-Qaeda had that shit--the shit of conventional warfare--they'd all be dead now. Our military was built for conventional warfare. We are built to take on Hitler. We were made to take on Korea. We were designed for that great war that never happened between us an Moscow. America will fuck you up in conventional warfare. We rule the seas and we rule the skies and we can dispatch an Army halfway across the world and not flinch. We are the last of the jingoist shit-kickers. We are the only one's who've ever dropped the bomb. We are the leaders of the "free world."
But we are not guerrilla fighters. We were not made to fight the war of a thousand cuts with an enemy who doesn't play by the rules of engagement.
We're grappling around like thugs in the dark, firing at whatever moves, learning as we go.
So appeasement? You actually have to have a country to "appease" someone, like how Bush is working with the North Koreans even though they sold Nuclear information and parts to Syria. Israel is trying to make peace with Syria but still doesn't trust them (hence they blew up the nuclear reactor they denied they were building. Sure ...). So we write a note politely asking Kim Jong Il to not sell nuclear material to the enemies of our friends?
We're being hand-holding with the Saudis for oil and the Kuwatis and Chinese are loaning us money for a war machine we can't afford. And isn't that what Osama wanted in the first place? The ultimate symbolism of attacking the Twin Towers in New York twice, once to declare his war and the second to create our ultimate fear. It was a statement. It was murderous language. He wanted to take out the symbols of our might, our crowning achievement, our altar to capitalism, consumerism, arrogance.
And now we're begging for our allies to lift a finger in Afghanistan and they're balking even though it's in their backyard. Turkey is eying Kurdistan with murderous desire. We're worrying about Pakistan and watching Lebanon on the bring of Civil War, again. Seeing the Palestinian territory go to shit because our government pushed a free election that even the Israelis thought was a bad idea. Who thought people would miss Yassar Arafat and his PLO that kept them all in the same bucket. At least you knew who to talk to. Now you've got splinter groups and rogue groups, some sensible, some hell bent on destruction. And we won't deal with any of them. Better to let their hatred simmer and show its head again in some demonstrative way.
George W. is right in the sense that you cannot negotiate with al-Qaeda but not for the reason he says. You can't do it because al-Qaeda is a ghost. Like the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood which has lasted long since the death of it's creator, Hassan al-Banna. The Muslim Brotherhood is not a man, it is a movement. You don't need to know Osama bin Laden to follow the path that goes back as far as 1928 when al-Banna formed the organization to combat the secularism westerners brought to Egypt. The Brotherhood movement spread, later inspiring a young Osama bin Laden.
Al-Banna died in 1949 yet his movement lives on. And I guarantee, when Osama croaks al-Qaeda will live on, because we are not fighting men, we are fighting movements.
You can't compare this to Hitler. There were no ghosts of Nazis left to fight. Just hiding old men with new names denying their war crimes from the sanctuary of Argentina. In the Middle East radical groups and conventional groups have tried to kill the Israelis, they've tried to uproot them, but Israel has the strongest military in the Middle East. They rule the skies. They have the bomb. What they have left are ghosts of a movement, individuals with a dream that what was once there's will be there's again. What you have left are political parties/militant groups. Some who you can deal with. Some you cannot. But if we and the Israelis can't learn the difference, if we're still dragging out the ghost of Hitler to insult his killing machine with Hamas' homemade qassam rockets and weakened political structure, with their control of ... nothing, where Israel can turn off the power and water, how are these people Hitler?
Who could turn of Hitler's power and water?
If you want to say it's hard to negotiate with terrorists and I can agree with you. Some folks can't be bargained with. But you can't lump everyone in the same box. You can't look in the face of every zealot, every enemy and see Hitler's ghost. Hitler's dead. Adapt and learn how to deal with the men and the madness that exists today.