I was browsing the Free Republic, and had a minor revelation. A lot of people on the right seem to feel that Iraq is part of the "War On Terror", and I've always assumed that this was because they had been led to believe that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. They, on the other hand, think that we are deluded because we can't see that Iraq is central to the War. But I've come to believe that the difference in how we see the war is not based on their ignorance of facts, but on a basic difference in how we see the Islamic world.
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Then I saw this quote:
We're only going to win it by making the entire Islamic world fear us as much as they hate us.
Exactly. That's the way to deal with bullies, especially the ones who blow up civilians, women, and children.
And
"It can if religion is not controlling governance"
It always is in Islam. Ask any Muslim to choose between Islam and his country and he will choose Islam. That means he will do what his mullah says even if that means breaking the law or even killing others. You haven't noticed this yet?
Most assuredly have.
It is built into their religion. It will have to be overcome, or we will most certainly be required to destroy them, or die trying.
This is why people who maintain that moderates need to speak out are wrong. If a moderate should do this, he will be ostracized or killed.
A war is required between the moderates and the fundamentalists and the religion needs to be adjusted in a similar fashion that changed Christianity.
A tall order............
Unlikely, but possible. It will take a very special person.
Or, it will take a declaration of war by a government against a religion. Both of these are equally unlikely, anytime soon.
It would be easier if the rest of the world saw it as we do. (The Islamic Threat)
But they don't and I am not going to hold my breath.
In the interim, we can only give them the opportunity to change from within and continue to exert pressure until something breaks.
In the end, we may well need to eradicate the entire mess.
It hit me that the people who wrote this hold the entire Islamic world responsible for 9/11. They make no distinction between Al Quaeda and Iraq. They are angry, and they want to strike out, and they don't particularly care if their target is the actual perpetrator or someone else who is part of the same problem.
For them, this is the Crusades all over again. Bush was criticized for using that term, and he denied that he meant any comparison to "The Crusades", but I think it wasn't an accident. I think it was a message to his supporters. They knew that he was denying that this was a crusade against Islam only because of politics, but he really means to terrorize and weaken all of Islam so that they will be afraid to attack us again.
If you assume that this war is on Islam, not on Al Quaeda, the other things make more sense. For example, I never understood why the right doens't seem to care about OBL anymore. Now I see that in their minds it doesn't matter if we get OBL, because every time we kill a Muslim we are hurting the people who attacked us. It doesn't matter if we kill a few thousand innocent children, because the only way to stop the Islamic threat is to hurt them so badly that they are afraid to attack us - all of them, any of them. They know that Iraq has nothing to do with 9/11, or at least not directly. It doesn't matter. Iraq is a Muslim nation, and therefore it's citizens want to hurt us and are indirecely responsible for 9/11. Any Iraqi who is not actually fighting for the U.S. is an enemy and their death is no loss.
In the minds of the far right, it is "them or us", and it doesn't matter if the exact Muslim's who attacked us are the ones being killed, as long as we are destroying them so that they can't hurt us. For these extremists, the only option is destroying Islam as it currently exists.
The comments were in a thread about the seven marines killed yesterday, and the thread included some other disturbing statements that lead me to believe that this paradigm is accurate, including a desire to see cities flattened before a soldier could be sent in, suggestions that it was time to use nuclear weapons, and suggestions that it was time to give "ultimatums" to Syria and Iraq
My point is that they aren't fighting the same war we are. We are assuming that if we can convince people that the cost is too high, they will want to leave Iraq. But the way these people think, there is nothing that will convince them to leave Iraq, because Iraq is the front line in the War on Terror, and there is no truth that will convince them otherwise.