Raids foil plot to bring 7/7 terror to Germany It sounds like they were more interested in striking an American target according to this. There's seething resentment behind it either way. Their motives are their own, but Germany is not really a country that's bound to be a target itself. At the risk of turning public opinion of yet another country against them, "them" being whatever radical sect they are representing, they intend to sway opinion in the U.S. by committing such acts. Neo-conservatives have hijacked our foreign policy and made US citizens targets of terror. However, both before and after Iraq, many U.S. citizens have had strong negative feelings towards this administration. Even if the American voters elect a large majority of Democrats and a fellow president, the terrorists will still see no reason to stop even then. Tell me, what is their end point? Is it terror for terror's sake? It seems like blind hatred that will never subside.
I wouldn't see the point. Not many people live on those US bases (and I've been to quite a few). What is interesting is that unlike British army bases US ones really are like a slice of America, they use US Dollars and such for currency.
Terrorists are idiots. The only reason that they manage to do some damage is because the governmental agencies that fight them are idiots as well. Both terrorists and the War on Terror™ agencies do not realise that they are both falling into the correspondent inference trap. Correspondent Inference theory says: the more likely an action results in a certain consequence, the more likely that action will be interpreted by an observer as having intended that consequence. For instance. I thump you in the nose. That act can have very few different outcomes other than hurting you (there is a high correspondence between the act and its consequence), and will therefore be interpreted by anyone observing this (and yourself) as having that intention. Most likely, you will now thump me back. But suppose I am trying to open a stuck window. I pull and I pull, the handle suddenly breaks, my arm flings back and as I stagger back uncontrollably, I thump you in the nose. Anyone observing this will interpret this as unintentional, as the act of opening a window generally rarely results in hurting someone. There is little correspondence between act and consequence; hence the act is not inferred as having had that intention. You may be pissed off, but you are likely to see it for what it was: an accident. Now terrorists want to achieve some political goal (so they say): free Palestine, make Northern Ireland independent, leave Iraq/Afghanistan, stop testing your cosmetics on those poor cute bunnywabbits. They do this by planting bombs, which has no direct consequence for a change in politics, but does quite directly result in killing civilians. Therefore the perception of the public is that the terrorists intend to kill people, period. Nobody looks at the political motivations because the correspondence between terrorist activity and political change is rather indirect, vague and tenuous. But terrorists are locked into some sort of infantile rebellious-teenager dynamic, so they can't see that their tactics are self-defeating. The same goes for Western governments fighting the War on Terror™. They perceive that the intention of terrorists is to create terror, period. This is rather a shame, because if they paid a bit more attention to their political goals, you could start a dialogue with them on that. This is what eventually happened in Northern Ireland, when the government finally wised up. Moreover, if the immeditate consequence of the actions by those Western governments fighting the War on Terror™ is to totally derail Middle Eastern countries into chaos and cause the death and dislocation of thousands of innocent civilians, then that is what the Middle East will perceive to be the intention of those governments. And that creates more terrorists, ready to join the game...
Very very nicely put Nexxo. Catch 22 all around, goverment's reaction to terrorism creates more terrorism, no one accompishes thier "stated" goals...repeat.
I cry ********! I grew up in Germany as an American. Since 1982 I have lived with the fact that I was a target of terrorism. Where ever I went in Europe, I knew as a kid and teenager, that there were people targeting me and others like me. This is nothing new. I hate it when people act like terrorism existed only after 9/11. It's been around a LONG time. Just because you were all sitting safely on your asses in the US, and started screaming bloody murder after one hit, doesn't mean the rest of us weren't living normal lives with the constant threat for a long time. From the tube stations in London to a disco in Rome, this is how it has been for a while and it never change our lives. This administration, while criminally incompetent, can hardly take the blame for radicals in Germany. They have existed since Eisenhower was in office. If they weren't nutjob muslims, they would have been nutjob lefties or nutjob skinheads. Badner-Meinhof, Red Army Faction, ETA, IRA, PLO.....The list of people that have wanted to hurt me is so long that I have a hard time keeping track of it. Time for America to grow up and live like the rest of us do. The fact that a nation is paralyzed in fear is the fault of it's citizens, not the government.
There is such a thing as adding fuel to the fire. The foreign policy has been hijacked by neo-conservatives because that is who's in the White House now. I never said that Americans have been targets only since 9/11. The WTC was bombed several years before 9/11 for instance... and so on and so on. There had been a huge proliferation of occurrences since this disastrous foreign policy has been instituted however.
