The status quo.

Editor,

One can applaud success in militarily suppressing actors alienated from the neoliberal global project:

Clap. . . Clap. . . Clap . . .

I personally would prefer a global economic model that, rather than to whisk all but a rounding error of the world's wealth into a small number of hands, cultivates thriving local economies that foster belonging and encourage participation.

The problem of terrorism and the solution to it, in my view, does not begin with the blood-curdling atrocities of Islamist extremists and end with universal martial law to minimize its occurrence from now til kingdom come.

The conditions of an individual's life and what he perceives his relationship to society to be determines, in my view, the extent to which he is willing to identify himself with it.

Robert A. Pape's research illuminating the correlation between occupation and suicide bombings has long ago been swept under the rug.

But if you are capable of thinking abstractly and have seen documentaries like "Let's Make Money" that demonstrate how commodities grown or extracted for export enrich global corporations by impoverishing local economies, you can conceptualize the planet Earth itself as occupied.

This is an arrangement government can do something about. But it means challenging an entrenched and unimaginably powerful status quo.

Re: "Raids Show the Limits of U.S. Military Strikes" (10/7/2013)