The Whole Truth

19 January 2004


British Terror Expert Says War Can Be Won -- By 2039

The recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas overshadowed another meeting held in that den of iniquity and fun -- the US Government Convention on Emerging Technologies. While the world's tech reporter's "oohed" and "aahed" over new MP3 players, iPods and such, few of them noticed a speech by Superintendent Stuart Harrison at the lesser event. A British terrorism authority, Superintendent Harrison, said the war on terror would take 35 to 50 years to win.

While it may come as a shock to voters, presidential candidates and parliamentary oppositions, the intelligence community, as exemplified by Superintendent Harrison, knows that this war isn't going to end any time soon. Estimates of anything less than half a lifetime are simply wrong. The reason for this is in the nature of the enemy.

Even in a free and open exchange of ideas, it remains a very rare event when a human being actually changes his or her mind based on facts and reason. More often, ideas change because evidence piles up against the old view and the people holding that view die off. Following generations, equipped with more facts, adopt new views. European communism is a fine example of this process. There were, in the early 20th century, far more believers in European communism than at that century's end. The evidence that communism had not brought about a workers' paradise was overwhelming. Yet few 1950s communists had abandoned their beliefs by 1990 (and all the old Bolsheviks were gone). Rather, those who grew up in the 1970s and saw their world for what it was as the 1950s generation died.

The current enemy believes that the western, secular capitalist system of liberal democracy must be brought down because it is the Creator's will that such happens. A few defeats will not prove the case. However, a generation or two of Muslims who come of age watching the west root out those who claim to be doing the Creator's work, and failing at it, will eventually overcome the militants by force of numbers.

In the end, there will always be those who think the earth is flat, that one race is superior to all the others and that fairies live in the garden. So long as they don't use force to convince the unbelievers, there is no harm. For those that insist on violence, the evidence of its inefficacy has yet to reach the point where the nonviolent have the upper hand. It will take a while for that to happen. As the good superintendent said, "it will be 35 to 50 years before we get it cracked."

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