Why not stop provoking terrorism?
Re Husband of terror victim cut PM’s call short, Jan. 22 I sympathize with the families of people killed in the Burkina Faso terror attack but I can’t help wondering about suggestions that Canada should step up bombing in Syria in retaliation. The Canadians were killed in Burkina Faso. Would it not be more satisfying retribution to send our planes to bomb Burkina Faso?
But who do we blame for the attacks? If the killing of a few Canadians in Burkina Faso justifies bombing attacks in Syria, then surely the killing of Canadians in Burkina Faso was justified by the killing of Afghans in Afghanistan, Iraqis in Iraq and Syrians in Syria. Turnabout is fair play, they say, and at this stage we in the western world are ahead by several hundred thousand killings. Let’s hope ISIS and other “terror” groups don’t try to even the score. Besides, bombing has never won a war. Hitler’s blitz did not knock England out of the Second World War and when economist J.K. Galbraith studied the effect of allied bombing on Germany, he found that German arms production had peaked in late 1944.
We had air superiority, but the Korean war was a draw. The Americans dropped more bombs in Vietnam than they had in the Second World War, but they lost the war. The bombing of Cambodia helped Pol Pot to take power there.
It’s lots of fun to bomb an “enemy” and it’s very profitable for the corporations that make the planes and the bombs, but the evidence suggests that bombing builds, rather than breaks, resistance.
Western governments have spent billions of dollars on the series of wars that George Bush Sr. began and Jr. continued, but we’re a long way from peace. Does anyone else notice that the flood of refugees entering Europe from Libya, Iran, Afghanistan and Syria are coming from three countries that the U.S. “liberated” from governments that people did not see the need to flee from, and one that was for years a client state that, in one case at least, tortured a Canadian on the orders of U.S. “security” forces?
Maybe the best way to end terrorism would be to stop provoking it. Andy Turnbull, Toronto