Cliff,
You may (or may not) be surprised to learn that those who live in abject poverty in so many places around the globe cannot empathize with the wealth of America any more than Americans can empathise with their poverty. Somethings are beyond comprehension.
I got my first dose of this as a young Captain standing in the Saudi desert attempting to describe my home in SW Oregon to the Egyptian soldiers and officers I worked with. Even when I finally got a tourist brochure and showed them pictures of the coast, the forests, the farms, Crater Lake, etc their eyes went wide with wonder, but they still could not truly comprehend something so far from the only reality they had ever known.
Fast forward to today. The size of bounties placed on HVTs in the Southern Philippines was (and likely is) a big problem. The amounts were too large. Tell someone you will pay them $6 Million for a guy and they don't get it. Tell them you'll pay them $6,000 and suddenly you have their attention. Like an inverse scene from Austin Powers. The first amount is too large to comprehend, the second is wealth beyond belief, but within understanding. Heck, we'd probably have rounded up all the AQ senior leaders world wide long ago if we had reduced the largest reward to about $25,000 for bin Ladin. It's not like we are attempting to lure western bounty hunters to go after them.
But that too points out how we have hindered our own efforts by not being able to epathize with the affected populaces where the base of support for such movements exists. Much smaller rewards and DA raids on senior leaders in Pakistan would have likely been seen as quite reasonable by the Pashtun populace that harbored them.
Instead we created this elaborate and intrusive construct that takes us farther from the prize every day. Crazy.
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