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Information-Age War

Posted on March 30th, 2011 by Staks

Recently President Obama decided to take military action in Libya. We are already involved in military action in Iraq (still) and Afghanistan. We are fighting as if this was still the 20th century. The problem is that we are now in the information age and we ought to be conducting our wars accordingly.

Missiles, bombs, guns, and soldiers aren’t going to work in the Middle-East. We have been in Iraq for a decade and not much has changed over there. The speech Obama gave in Egypt awhile back did more to advance freedom and democracy in the region than all the soldiers and military operations in the last decade. Twitter and Facebook have started revolutions.

These nations are mostly ruled by religion and so the way we should fight against them is with information, education, and getting people to think critically. Instead of sending in the military, we should be sending in information and education. While we should be willing to send troops to help out those who are revolting, we also need to help educate them about science and reality.

That’s the problem with Afghanistan. We took over the country and we control the cities most of the time. But the fact is that the Taliban are still running the show because they aren’t an army, they are an idea. More specifically, they are an extreme religious idea and you can’t kill ideas (even bad ones) with guns. What we should have done there is to start educating the people of Afghanistan about critical thinking so that they can see for themselves that the ideas of the Taliban are ridiculous. Then they will not stand for the Taliban and will start to revolt. Then we could support such a revolution with troops. But troops alone will not and has not worked.