RE: question/comment

Your article is both articulate and well reasoned. I do, however, question the conclusion of your article. Your conclusion depends on many assumptions, one of which is that attitudes towards "human rights" will remain constant in the west. It seems to me that as terrorism becomes worse, that attitudes will change accordingly both here in the US and throughout the west. So the tendency to abstain from more violent means of ending terrorist organizations may diminish. Just a thought, but I won’t pretend to be an expert on the subject. You are indeed correct about the assumptions made in the article. The nation-state may, in fact, discard its ideas about the acceptable use of violence, but the organizational limits of the state will remain. To overcome this the state may, for a time, authorize some leader to possess additional powers not normally allotted to a president or prime minister. This situation might come to look much like the “dictator” system employed by Rome in times of extreme distress. The problem with that, as history has shown us, is that dictators like to keep power, eventually replacing republic with empire. The state may forego the dictator option and simply pursue an incredibly aggressive foreign and domestic anti-terrorism policy, but for that policy to be effective the state will have to grow and take on roles that we might otherwise not allow. We would trade dictatorship by a man for bureaucratic despotism. I cannot decide which would be worse. In any case, the state will cease to look like or function like governments we are comfortable with. Actually, if the state asserts itself too strongly to fight terrorism, it could become a greater evil than the terrorists themselves. It is a touchy situation.