What’s the best way to fight terrorism?
Promoting democracy
Military action
Tighter security
Lovely. The three options you have are Republican party-line options. Nowhere is “better foreign policy,” which is fundamentally part of the root of why terrorism happens. “Promoting democracy” is basically nation building, military action won’t do jack shit against decentralized terrorists, and tighter security will never be tight enough to protect everyone from everything. Nice. So our only options are to bow to our Republican masters, and accept their worldview, as CNN has, as the only option.
Assholes.
“Promoting democracy” is not necessarily nation building. We can take a “promoting democracy” tack that works more like it did with the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries, where basically they were exposed to things that are actually desireable about democracy and wanted it for themselves. As I understand it, the momentum built from the inside out because people felt that they were being left behind. This “promoting democracy” by the Bush administration is more of a “stuff it down your throat even though you are choking and fighting back to live” tactic which can only foment anger, hostility, and insularity. We are showing them the very worst of democracies: governments run by corporations, money siphoning by greedy parties. In addition, we have been, as a nation, flaunting our ignorance and disrespect for anyone different from us. Sure, there are things I think on an absolute scale that are not ok about the way things have been run in the Middle East. But instead of addressing these as individual issues that must be changed in order to allow society to progress in an equitable manner, we (again, as a nation) condemn entire societies as barbaric and subhuman. We, who electrocute people whose cases appear to show reasonable doubt, and in some cases specifically exclude them from the crime they supposedly committed.
There is definitely a better way to promote democracy, and that is what I would choose. And I don’t think that the question necessarily sets it up to mean what the Bush administration wants it to mean.