More than two years ago I wrote about the terrible injuries often endured by people who survive suicide bombs, and I mentioned the use of diseased suicide bombers who turn their own corpses into infectious projectiles. Well, now it looks like al Qaeda is learning from the Palestinians and is recruiting bombers with lethal diseases.
AL-QAEDA is recruiting suicide bombers who are infected with the AIDS virus, according to documents revealed to the Sunday Mirror.Terror chiefs are also targeting fanatics who suffer other lethal blood diseases such as hepatitis and dengue fever in order to increase their "kill rate" from an explosion. The chilling new threat is revealed in papers distributed to British military camps in Iraq and across Europe.
Under the heading "HIV/Hepatitis" the document states: "There is evidence that terrorists might be deliberately recruiting volunteers with diseases that are spread by blood transference."
Experts have found that bones and other blood-spattered fragments from a suicide bomber could penetrate the skin of a victim 50 metres away and infect them.
If they're really committed, there's no reason that bombers couldn't be deliberately infected in advance as well.
We really need to take more aggressive steps to eliminate terrorists.
This is terrifying.
But I'm still not convinced that aggression is the way we're going to overcome this threat. An aggressive West makes it easier for terror organisations to recruit, that's certain. The question is, does increasing aggression disable more than it encourages this type of violence?
I expect (without looking at details) that the marginal benefit of increasing aggression falls off as we become more aggressive; while the rate at which resistance spreads rises (eg. at some point near the limit of aggression, even I'd start resisting, and I'm almost a pacifist). If that's true, there must be a point at which more aggression is counterproductive. I'd need to do some work to say anything about where that point is though.
Remember, for a person considering a suicide bombing there is exactly zero potential for deterrent.
On the other hand, a comfortable population with no reason to resent the West tends not to resist it.
jez: I disagree, I think there are ways to deter them, but I'm not sure if we'd find them morally acceptable. For instance, we could promise to hunt down and kill every member of the bombers' families. We could napalm the bombers' villages. And so forth.
As for aggression being counterproductive, there may be a point where that's true, but then if you increase the aggression even more you can kill all your opponents, thereby being very productive. That doesn't sound very appealing, but what if it's either that or accept Dar al Islam?
Part of my assumption is that more aggressive anti-terrorist action encourages more people to become terrorists. For example, if the US started using napalm and killing families (of course, highly unlikely) it would become morally acceptable for me, and many others as reasonable is me, to terrorise in protest. (can't wait four years to vote, and presumably any non-violent resistance would be dealt with ruthlessly by that stage.) You can't kill all the terrorists, because if you did more terrorists would replace them.
In fact, I'm wrong. There are recent historical examples, eg. the former Yugoslavia was "peaceful" under Soviet control, and erupted into civil war shortly after it was liberated. Those factional problems did not appear overnight, they were there throughout the USSR's involvement, but kept under control by the regime. It's probably not possible to get reliable data on internal terrorist activity from that era, though our spies could have noticed such things.
jez: I'm kinda confused. You think many Americans would begin using terrorism against our own country if we started killing the Muslim civilians who aid, enable, and abet the Muslim terrorists who are fighting against us? How would that be different than when we killed German and Japanese civilians in WW2? Or, in fact, how every nation at war throughout history has killed enemy civilians when it serves a military purpose?
i'm not american, but that's not important right now.
If we were to go to such extremes as killing entire families / villages, then, certainly citizens of those countries we attack would be morally required to resist. And why not Americans? -- anti-Vietnaam demonstrations got fairly feisty.
War is different now, I don't think western civilians would accept our militaries using such indiscriminate weapons as urban bombing (like everyone did in WW2) now that we have more precise options.