Dumb Terrorist Policy
Our strategy to defeat terrorism? None. Or dumb.
Neither major party offers a strategy to marginalize terrorist recruitment and terrorism in what Republicans want to reframe for domestic assumption as the “Long War.”
Bigger bribes, sharper shrapnel bombs, larger recruitment bonuses, and catchy rhetoric are not a winning strategy. Extra cash, muscle, and simplistic phrases may have worked in schoolyards, but not in a complex world playground.
Teams
From grade school sports through the military, winning teams:
· Attract high caliber people willing to become good team players.
· Have smart coaches who train individuals into such well rounded mental and physical shape that they consistently play at a gold winning standard.
· Execute with precision plays that consistently move their team to scoring.
· Defend so smartly that the team’s morale, strength, and pride grows.
· Build legitimate belief from the lowliest player to team leaders, coaches, and supporting institutions that the team’s goals are good.
· Win the respect -- and sometimes fear – of their adversaries, who will often copy as much of a winning team’s strategies as they can.
· Develop a following of admirers, which, even when playing in the opponent’s neighborhood, often helps their team.
· Adapt to the changes in needs, tactics, and strategies that competition brings.
· Train and nurture their young to step into a winning tradition.
· Prepare the fields of competition for fewer bloody, uncivilized battles.
Empires
Great Empire buffs will recognize that Roman Gladiator,
General Maximus, built an earthshakingly good team upon these principles. Moviegoers caught a glimpse of that by
watching Richard Crowe turn condemned, discarded men into a fighting team that
moved the masses en-route to hastening a decaying empire’s demise. 
Good teams win the crowd GladiatorsDreamworks
Great empires thrive when they build good teams at all levels of life – economic, educational, and military. As their teams go, so goes their empire.
In the 21st century,
General Anthony Zinni gives an accurate picture of today’s battlefields
in his book
“The real threats do not come from
military forces or violent attacks; they do not come from a nation-state or
hostile non-state entities; they do not derive from an ideology (not even from
a radical, West-hating, violent brand of Islam). The real new threats come from
instability. Instability and the chaos
it generates can spark large and dangerous changes anywhere they land.” P. 214
Initially, seemingly brilliant Roman leaders thought they were
consolidating their control over the masses’ hearts and minds by feeding
weakened gladiators to lions, armored soldiers, and high-teched chariots. The dumbed-down, struggling, parochial masses
cheered.
In the end, however, the “condemned gladiators” relied on the
principles historically used to build winning teams. The condemned grew into a good team that
adapted. They beat the armored
gladiators. They won the masses’ hearts
and minds. The public relations ploy
failed. The empire fell.
“Win
the crowd…”
General Maximus was told, “Win the crowd, and you will win your
freedom.”
The images Romans pushed on their masses differed from those the
condemned Syrians, Jordanians, Africans, and Mesopotamians. Muslims, and Christians, hoped would reach
their followers. Our major media’s images
conveyed about our gladiators differ from those the Al Jazzeras convey to their viewers.
Eleven centuries after Roman images, today’s crowds need to see
different images. All nations need to win
hearts sans bloodshed.
·
From 1999 to 2006
·
Seventy-two percent of US
Soldiers in Iraq Think the US Should Pull out within a Year.
PEW Poll, 2006
·
Our Tsunami relief effort led to more favorable
views of the
In 21 mostly Muslim countries of
·
How many Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs) work among them in 2006? Fifty-eight PCVs.
One PCV for every 15,635,706 presents the building, caring, serving
ideals of
Is
Will your children have a better world to live in when the world soon
tops 7 billion?
Is a 6”4” cave dweller dragging his kidney dialysis machine
out-communicating and beating the American empire in an increasing number of
long civil, genocidal, refugee, resource wars, because we haven’t built the
right teams to win today?
General Zinni says, “We can win any battle…” But our military is not trained to win the
“ultimate victory.” To win the “ultimate
victory,” one must win “hearts and minds” by building world “stability.
The unstable parts? Those 70
failed or failing nations, out of the world’s 190 nations, in which about 3+
billion people struggle.
The most cost-effective means of winning hearts and minds, building
stability, and reducing the need to send our soldiers into battle?
Having a million trained, can-do, peaceful Americans knights help
stabilize unstable nations, and rebuild our own.
How do we do that? By helping
introduce and pass Peoples Lobby’s citizen-initiated American World Service
Corps (AWSC) proposed congressional legislation,
Today’s battlegrounds require strengthening existing teams that can
augment our good military teams. The
AWSC teams reduce the ignorance, scarcity, refugees, terrorist recruitment, and
warring that creates instability.
Implementing Peoples Lobby’s American World Service Corps congressional
proposals to incentivize a million Americans to voluntarily serve through the
Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, Habitat for Humanity, Head Start, Doctors Without
Borders, Red Cross, 
International Rescue Committee, OxFam, Mercy
Corps, and State Conservation Corps builds the kind of winning teams and
strategies that are desperately needed today.
More
Habitat Builders are among the Knights needed for the 21st century
battlefield.
We need fewer maimed and dying gladiators and many more Knights of the
Round Earth. Implementing