Louder Than Bombs

More explosions, more casualties, more fear and more terror.  Once again, the Pavlovian stimulus of this particular sort of violence elicits an increasingly predictable response, from all quarters:

1. From those who have bought the most nationalist, defensive posture: this is a fundamental problem with Islam, it allows radicalization and therefore must be treated as a cancer and extirpated wherever it is found.  More war, contain and conquer.
2. From those who react against such a knee jerk reaction with their own knee jerk reaction: No, it's not all of Islam, nor should we go on the rampage against the majority of law-abiding and peaceful Muslims.

For those who may not start at the fearful end, but cannot really find a home at at the acceptance end, the pull towards the fear gets stronger as explosions get closer to home and as the casualty count climbs.  Which is, of course, the goal of terrorism.  Simply stated, the objective of terrorists in the modern world is to provoke violence from the west, a task which we are allowing them to accomplish rather splendidly with very little resistance.
We need to distinguish the aims of terrorists from the aims of guerrilla warfare as it is waged by insurrectionists and rebels.  The aim of guerrilla warfare is to make it difficult, if not untenable, for a larger, more powerful force to continue in its necessary day to day operations.  The end game is that the occupying force decides it's just not worth it and goes home.  It happened to us in Vietnam, and the Russians in Afghanistan, it works given the proper conditions.
The agenda of Al Quaeda and ISIS is not, in fact, to drive the US out of their territory, but rather to draw us in, and for them to infiltrate our space.  Their goal is not to defeat us, but rather to impel us towards our inevitable self destruction, which from their perspective, is ordained by Allah, and imminent due to our decadence and moral decay.  When we respond to their violence with more violence we create destruction, which leads to poverty and desperation, which leads to anger and resentment among people who have no idea why someone blowing up a dumpster in New York is somehow their fault.  It's like a terrible and tragic version of a little bug going kerchoo.  Our bombs are the best recruiting tool ISIS has. How difficult is it for a teenager who just watched his house explode with his parents inside it to believe that the people who launched that bomb are his enemy?
They call this sort of thing "a vicious cycle" for good reason.
This is not obtuse logic here, the systems that lock us into these cycles can get complicated, but the simple fact of the matter is that the best way to stop the "radicalization" of Islamic folks is to fight the poverty and oppression that makes them even want to listen to someone who is telling them to die in the name of Allah.  Suicidal acts of violence are actually not on too many Muslim's short list of good ideas, but a little fear can go a long way.
I run into a good number of Americans, who have fallen victim to the same sort of fear and anger based thinking.  These people, usually good people, have become radicalized in their own way.  They are unmoved by the plight of refugees, at least not enough to actually advocate opening up and making room for them.  They enthusiastically support military intervention in all those parts of the globe that they have come to believe create our enemies.  They tacitly, if not explicitly believe that this "war on terror" can and should be waged like any other war, by simply defeating our enemy in battle.
It should be pretty obvious by now that winning the battles is losing the war.  We drive the Taliban out of power in Afghanistan they hide and wait for that inevitable when our own weight takes us down.  We "contain" ISIS, and they manage to convince dissatisfied and determined  people in Paris and elsewhere that they ought to take up the cause, fight for purity and orthodoxy.  Honestly there is very little we can do to protect ourselves from people that just want to blow us up.  Pressure vessel bombs are essentially impossible to prevent, they do not require high explosives or unusual substances.  In other words, no matter what anyone promises you, we are never going to be completely safe.  There are just too many ways to kill people, too many ways to create chaos and destruction if you don't have anything to lose.
I think the only answer is to work at reducing the number of desperately poor and even displaced people out there, and I don't mean by bombing them.