Quote Originally Posted by Virulent View Post
Or, to paraphrase Foucault, 'Punishment can be moderated only in so much as it is certain'. The more likely that someone can escape punishment, the more terrible it need necessarily be. This is visible in retrograde in most modern societies; as the percentage of murders that are left unsolved goes down, societies tend to relinquish capital punishment.

When one detonates an explosive belt, they guarantee they will not be punished. For this reason, they are nearly impossible to deter; you can put mechanical obstructions which prevent them from reaching their target (though all you're really doing is forcing them to choose different targets), or you can capitulate to their demands (in which case you have reinforced the maxim that 'war is the continuation of diplomacy by other means'), or you can confront them at a morally equivalent level. If every suicide bombing was answered by dropping a carpet of incendiaries on the home town (or some arbitrary town in their nation) of the suicide bomber, societies would do everything in their power to prevent their people from engaging in these sorts of attacks.

Are the people that would be killed in retributive attacks responsible for what they are being targeted for? Certainly not! If the Israelis announced that the next time Hezbollah mortared Sderot, they'd make Beirut look like Dresden, would it stop Hezbollah? Certainly not! Most people seem to expect that civility is a handicap that cannot be set down. I do not think it would take many examples to convince the poor and weak of this world that the wealthy still maintain the will and the power to keep them poor and weak though.
I'm not sure I get your point here. On the one hand you seem to be advocating massive retaliation against innocent civilians for acts of terror (thereby committing another act of terror) while on the other hand you seem to be stating the futility of doing so. And it would, indeed, be futile, adding fuel to the fires which forge these insanities.

No, the only way to stop such things is to remove those who advocate and support them. If a man straps a bomb to his chest and blows up a school, it's not necessarily his village or even his family who should be held responsible, but those who built the bomb for him, and those who paid for that bomb, and those who preached to him that he would receive his reward in some mythical afterlife after committing an act of madness and murder.

The way to stop Hezbollah, or any other radical terrorist organization, is to stop their financing. If they cannot pay for weapons, cannot pay for bomb builders, cannot pay to train their suicide bombers, then they will slowly die off. But this cannot be done passively. It must be handled aggressively and, in many cases, illegally. Bin Laden would quickly lose his power in the terrorist world if the civilized world seized and confiscated his wealth. The money is there, in banks around the world. Probably some of it even here in the US. Find those banks, seize those assets, and use them to compensate the victims of his madness, and see how quickly that madness grinds to a halt. And if a foreign nation decides to finance him in some way, then seize their assets as well. Take the war on terror out of the streets where innocent civilians are being killed and maimed and move it into the boardrooms and throne rooms of the wealthy and powerful. Instead of letting them become even more rich and powerful, make them pay the real price for their greed and stupidity.