0
   

The UN, US and Iraq IV

 
 
Gelisgesti
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Nov, 2003 09:03 am
timberlandko wrote:
Gel wrote:
So we are in a 'last man standing' situation? If that is true then why not nuke? Aftter all, they or "they" gassed their own people. Dead is dead right?


Hardly, but such hyperbole and misapprehension of reality is indicative of the dire need for education and understanding. The small, twisted, reactionary fraction of "They" ARE "In it 'till the last man standing" by their own declaration. "They" started the fight, "They" set their terms, "They" brought the fight to us. That will be "Their" undoing. What is required, and what is being done, is to assure that the far, far greater portion of The Islamic World, and, of course, of the Civilized World are freed of "Their" hateful tyrany, which places theologic hegemony above all other value and right. It is not a simple issue. It offers no pleasant remedy. It is war.


Whil you are 'eddikating' me perhaps you could tell me all about how they 'brought the fight to us?
0 Replies
 
timberlandko
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Nov, 2003 09:13 am
If you truly don't know how "They brought the fight to us", Gel, you have a woeful grasp of world events. I suppose, though, by your statements, that is evident.
0 Replies
 
Gelisgesti
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Nov, 2003 09:22 am
timberlandko wrote:
If you truly don't know how "They brought the fight to us", Gel, you have a woeful grasp of world events. I suppose, though, by your statements, that is evident.


And the answer to my question?
Can we stick to the debate and overlook my personal failings?
0 Replies
 
Tartarin
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Nov, 2003 09:27 am
We could start with Pat Robertson, Brand...
0 Replies
 
Kara
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Nov, 2003 09:33 am
Quote:
(I was going to say stick with page 3, but then page 3 is often quite sticky)


Steve! This is a family thread... Laughing

Quote:
this is a serious question(s)

Just what is it we have done that has so annoyed these Islamic militants that they are prepared to blow us up and kill themselves and many fellow Muslims in the process? Or is it just that they really really really don't like us. Because they've read it in a Book.


.We turned away from our hunt for Bin Laden and other known Al-Qaeda operatives to attack Iraq in the name of "terror." Al-Qaeda must have been deliriously happy that we left the rest of the world open for terror-ops whilst we concentrated on Iraq. Other disaffected and militant groups went to school on al-qaeda and, like the Turkish Islamic group, learned their lessons quickly. In my opinion, Al-Qaeda has become a franchise.

Until we get rid of the thorn in the Muslim side -- the occupation of Israel, which has become a powerful symbol of everything they hate about the western world -- the terror will continue, fed by anger-mongering schools in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.

Timber is right in that education, a degree of economic prosperity, and more secular governments will help raise a generation that has a more enlightened view and thus hope for a different world, but as it is now, the terrorists hold all the cards. With worldwide cooperation among like-minded nations, (a friendship and alliance that we threw away when we attacked Iraq) terrorism could be brought to heel.

Quote:
If we stop annoying them will they stop killing us, or are they determined to go on and on until the Great Satan and its running dog (well poodle) are defeated and Sharia law prevails world wide?


I don't think Sharia law is their goal, except in a few instances. Terrorists use their tactics to protest against large powerful nations, whom they don't have the weapons to attack in conventional ways, and who are ruling the world in a way that they don't agree with, like allowing Israel to occupy Palestine.
0 Replies
 
dyslexia
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Nov, 2003 09:36 am
"----- determination to complete the work of -----at any cost and by any means created what historian D. Michael Quinn called a culture of violence. The decision to do whatever was necessary to build the kingdom encouraged ----- to consider it their religious right to kill agnostic outsiders, common criminals, ----, and even faithful who committed sins worthy of death. What made --- violence unique was that it occurred in a settled, well-organized community whose leaders publicly sanctioned doctrines of vengeance and ritual murder. What made it terrible were its grim consequences."
Muslim terrorists? nope, Mormons in Utah.
0 Replies
 
Gelisgesti
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Nov, 2003 09:42 am
Dys, a tip o' the Hatlo hat
0 Replies
 
timberlandko
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Nov, 2003 09:48 am
OK, since facts, figures, and hard news are of less interest to some than opinion, here's a bit of opinion by way of answer to your question, Gel.
Quote:
http://mirror.canada.com/images/logo_cc_news.gifAs anti-Bush cries grow, 'how soon Europe forgets'

David Warren
The Ottawa Citizen
Wednesday, November 19, 2003


Fritz Kraemer died recently. What has this got to do with U.S. President George W. Bush's visit to London? Let me explain.

The monocle-wearing Professor Kraemer, a curious survivor of Wilhelmine Germany, and an accomplished scholar of international law, political philosophy and history, died of kidney failure at 95 in Washington on Sept. 8. It could be argued that his was the clearest mind behind the American prosecution of the Cold War against Soviet Communism. From a small office in the Pentagon, he taught a generation of U.S. officers not only the principles of geostrategic warfare, but the reasons why it must be fought and won.

Mr. Kraemer grasped that it takes more than superior manpower and firepower to defeat an ideologically driven enemy. He knew that geostrategic contests are determined as much by irrational and immaterial factors. He grasped that the great weakness of the United States and the West, after the defeat of Nazism, was identical with the great weakness of Germany that had allowed the rise of Hitler.

In each case, it is the existence of an intellectual elite who think about abstractions instead of realities, and whose instinct to appease a mortal enemy is founded in a lazy, cowardly, and conceited moral relativism. Mr. Kraemer was father to the phrase "provocative weakness" -- in two words, the reason why the West is under attack today from such terror networks as al-Qaeda.

The man was a miracle of nature. In the Germany of his early manhood, in the 1930s, he launched himself physically and fearlessly into demonstrations by both Brownshirts and Reds, as a streetfighting army of one.

He merits a full hagiography -- I invite readers to Google-search the obituaries -- but my purpose today is to juxtapose him with Henry Kissinger, whose intellectual mentor Mr. Kraemer was. Mr. Kraemer disowned his protege in the detente era of the 1970s.

He believed Mr. Kissinger guilty of spineless concessions to the political and intellectual zeitgeist. Mr. Kraemer was a man who believed in fighting for the truth -- regardless of consequences -- and of fighting with no option of surrender or even compromise with evil. He was no "mere conservative."

Donald Rumsfeld is his true protege in the U.S. government, and to a lesser extent so is Mr. Bush. These are men who realize the U.S., and all free peoples, has a mortal enemy in ideological Islamism, and that it must be defeated rather than accommodated.

This has made them deeply unpopular with the intelligentsia of our time, and especially with their half-educated reflection in the mass media. Europe and Canada are much farther down the rathole to surrender, but the U.S. also teeters.

As I write, anti-Bush demonstrations are cranking up in the London streets. Surprisingly, the most recent survey of British public opinion shows fully 62 per cent essentially pro-American -- despite the 24/7 barrage of anti-American malice in such media as the BBC. And Prime Minister Tony Blair has, so far, survived the political ordeal of standing with Mr. Bush, the Poles, the Australians and other allies against Islamo-fascism, in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But there is hell to pay for this courageous position.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing -- and those with little knowledge of how the world unfolds demand that the U.S. and Britain give up defending themselves against the menace made visible on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. To what is apparently a majority of polling respondents on the European continent, little democratic Israel is the world's most dangerous country, and George W. Bush its most dangerous man.

What is interesting here, to those capable of taking a longer view, is the spectacle of history repeating itself -- less in outward events, than in inward structure. As in the 1930s, leftists and pacifists on the streets of Europe directly advanced the triumphs of Nazism, so today the demonstrators work to advance the triumphs of Islamism for they refuse to acknowledge the consequences of ignoring such an enemy.

And so the bombing of synagogues in Istanbul draws, from Britain's Stop the War Coalition, no whimper of distress. But the arrival in England of the western world's pre-eminent statesman ignites a self-righteous outcry; and the coalition's demonstrators directly aid potential terrorists by distracting the police from urgent security measures.

In their own subjective world of illusions, the demonstrators demand not surrender, but an unobtainable "peace." However, in the objective world of cause and effect, they are reliable allies of the people who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center, who blow up Jews in synagogues and supermarkets, who tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and bulldozed their bodies into mass graves.

The connection between present and past was well-made in an e-mail forwarded to me from an American Jew, returning from holiday in Europe. He wrote: "When my grandfather left Europe in 1937, the graffiti on the walls read, 'Jews go to Palestine.' Today the graffiti reads, 'Jews out of Palestine.' How soon Europe forgets."

Fritz Kraemer, that German refugee in the U.S., understood what Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair were about. He had a reputation as a moral absolutist. Which means he refused to succumb to evil.

Read previous columns by David Warren at www.ottawacitizen.com .

© The Ottawa Citizen 2003


I don't expect this will sway any who are committed to the policies which fostered the tragedies of the previous century. Its far easier to ignore peril than to face it. No matter how often that lesson is presented, it meets resistance. Comfort is a debilitating thing. That some will forsake comfort for principle is precisely why Russian, German, and Japanese are local, not regional languages today.
0 Replies
 
Gelisgesti
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Nov, 2003 09:56 am
timberlandko wrote:
OK, since facts, figures, and hard news are of less interest ot some than opinion, here's a bit of opinion by way of answer to your question, Gel.
Quote:
http://mirror.canada.com/images/logo_cc_news.gifAs anti-Bush cries grow, 'how soon Europe forgets'

David Warren
The Ottawa Citizen
Wednesday, November 19, 2003


Fritz Kraemer died recently. What has this got to do with U.S. President George W. Bush's visit to London? Let me explain.

The monocle-wearing Professor Kraemer, a curious survivor of Wilhelmine Germany, and an accomplished scholar of international law, political philosophy and history, died of kidney failure at 95 in Washington on Sept. 8. It could be argued that his was the clearest mind behind the American prosecution of the Cold War against Soviet Communism. From a small office in the Pentagon, he taught a generation of U.S. officers not only the principles of geostrategic warfare, but the reasons why it must be fought and won.

Mr. Kraemer grasped that it takes more than superior manpower and firepower to defeat an ideologically driven enemy. He knew that geostrategic contests are determined as much by irrational and immaterial factors. He grasped that the great weakness of the United States and the West, after the defeat of Nazism, was identical with the great weakness of Germany that had allowed the rise of Hitler.

In each case, it is the existence of an intellectual elite who think about abstractions instead of realities, and whose instinct to appease a mortal enemy is founded in a lazy, cowardly, and conceited moral relativism. Mr. Kraemer was father to the phrase "provocative weakness" -- in two words, the reason why the West is under attack today from such terror networks as al-Qaeda.

The man was a miracle of nature. In the Germany of his early manhood, in the 1930s, he launched himself physically and fearlessly into demonstrations by both Brownshirts and Reds, as a streetfighting army of one.

He merits a full hagiography -- I invite readers to Google-search the obituaries -- but my purpose today is to juxtapose him with Henry Kissinger, whose intellectual mentor Mr. Kraemer was. Mr. Kraemer disowned his protege in the detente era of the 1970s.

He believed Mr. Kissinger guilty of spineless concessions to the political and intellectual zeitgeist. Mr. Kraemer was a man who believed in fighting for the truth -- regardless of consequences -- and of fighting with no option of surrender or even compromise with evil. He was no "mere conservative."

Donald Rumsfeld is his true protege in the U.S. government, and to a lesser extent so is Mr. Bush. These are men who realize the U.S., and all free peoples, has a mortal enemy in ideological Islamism, and that it must be defeated rather than accommodated.

This has made them deeply unpopular with the intelligentsia of our time, and especially with their half-educated reflection in the mass media. Europe and Canada are much farther down the rathole to surrender, but the U.S. also teeters.

As I write, anti-Bush demonstrations are cranking up in the London streets. Surprisingly, the most recent survey of British public opinion shows fully 62 per cent essentially pro-American -- despite the 24/7 barrage of anti-American malice in such media as the BBC. And Prime Minister Tony Blair has, so far, survived the political ordeal of standing with Mr. Bush, the Poles, the Australians and other allies against Islamo-fascism, in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But there is hell to pay for this courageous position.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing -- and those with little knowledge of how the world unfolds demand that the U.S. and Britain give up defending themselves against the menace made visible on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. To what is apparently a majority of polling respondents on the European continent, little democratic Israel is the world's most dangerous country, and George W. Bush its most dangerous man.

What is interesting here, to those capable of taking a longer view, is the spectacle of history repeating itself -- less in outward events, than in inward structure. As in the 1930s, leftists and pacifists on the streets of Europe directly advanced the triumphs of Nazism, so today the demonstrators work to advance the triumphs of Islamism for they refuse to acknowledge the consequences of ignoring such an enemy.

And so the bombing of synagogues in Istanbul draws, from Britain's Stop the War Coalition, no whimper of distress. But the arrival in England of the western world's pre-eminent statesman ignites a self-righteous outcry; and the coalition's demonstrators directly aid potential terrorists by distracting the police from urgent security measures.

In their own subjective world of illusions, the demonstrators demand not surrender, but an unobtainable "peace." However, in the objective world of cause and effect, they are reliable allies of the people who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center, who blow up Jews in synagogues and supermarkets, who tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and bulldozed their bodies into mass graves.

The connection between present and past was well-made in an e-mail forwarded to me from an American Jew, returning from holiday in Europe. He wrote: "When my grandfather left Europe in 1937, the graffiti on the walls read, 'Jews go to Palestine.' Today the graffiti reads, 'Jews out of Palestine.' How soon Europe forgets."

Fritz Kraemer, that German refugee in the U.S., understood what Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair were about. He had a reputation as a moral absolutist. Which means he refused to succumb to evil.

Read previous columns by David Warren at www.ottawacitizen.com .

© The Ottawa Citizen 2003


I don't expect this will sway any who are committed to the policies which fostered the tragedies of the previous century. Its far easier to ignore peril than to face it. No matter how often that lesson is presented, it meets resistance. Comfort is a debilitating thing.




Why are you so reluctant to answer?
I can google up a zillion answers .... you made the statement! If you don't have an answer .... then say so.
Then we can move on, just don't make assertions without a basis.
0 Replies
 
timberlandko
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Nov, 2003 10:06 am
OK ... I'll try this ... They brought the fight to us in Beirut in the 60's, and in Munich and Iran in the '70s, and again in Beirut in the 80s, and in Lockerbee, and in Mogadishu, and in Yemen, and in Kuwait, and in New York, and in Istanbul, and .... well, that's the whole point you miss. Its war, its been underway for a generation, and it has become far more difficult, and dangerous, to ignore.
0 Replies
 
cicerone imposter
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Nov, 2003 10:15 am
Steve, You are asking the right questions, but I doubt any western-style rational thinking has a chance of being answered. We can see them as extremists and terrorists which they are from our viewpoint, but they have a completely different perspective. I think a hint at an answer can be found in the experiment done at Stanford University some years ago where they found that "normal," better educated students can be directed to iimpose great pain on others when they are directed to do so as part of a "leading" group.
0 Replies
 
Gelisgesti
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Nov, 2003 10:20 am
timberlandko wrote:
OK ... I'll try this ... They brought the fight to us in Beirut in the 60's, and in Munich and Iran in the '70s, and again in Beirut in the 80s, and in Lockerbee, and in Mogadishu, and in Yemen, and in Kuwait, and in New York, and in Istanbul, and .... well, that's the whole point you miss. Its war, its been underway for a generation, and it has become far more difficult, and dangerous, to ignore.


I confess an ignorance of the entire terrorist movement so I will have to limit myself to a discussion of the more recent events .... let's try ... New York. Are you saying that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 bombings? If that is your 'assertion' how do you explain the Afghanistan attack ... Afghanistan conspired with Iraq to attack New York? Please explain.
0 Replies
 
Kara
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Nov, 2003 10:25 am
Quote:
the experiment done at Stanford University some years ago where they found that "normal," better educated students can be directed to iimpose great pain on others when they are directed to do so as part of a "leading" group.


c.i., are you perhaps enlightening us as to the motivations of our leaders? Laughing

I remember that study...
0 Replies
 
Kara
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Nov, 2003 10:27 am
Gelisgesti, thanks for the Josh Marshall website. Interesting...
0 Replies
 
timberlandko
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Nov, 2003 10:27 am
Steve, you cannot separate any of those events, or the others I cited, from the War on Terror any more than the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, or the German invasion of Poland from WWII. All those were "isolated, unrelated-to-our-own-interests-and-security" incidents to some.
0 Replies
 
cicerone imposter
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Nov, 2003 10:29 am
Kara, It also applies to us - sadly.
0 Replies
 
Gelisgesti
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Nov, 2003 10:33 am
Kara wrote:
Gelisgesti, thanks for the Josh Marshall website. Interesting...


Very welcome B.

Follow the links on the left side for more good stuff.
0 Replies
 
Suzette
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Nov, 2003 11:02 am
There's an ironic/whatever picture at this site, but I don't know how to get it here, so would you all please click on the site and take a look? I'd be mighty obliged:

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/031120/481/lon831311202026&e=1&ncid=1479

(Edit by timber: Here's your picture, Suzette. See the FAQ, and the Help Forum, both linked in my signature, for the "how to")
http://us.news2.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/ap/20031120/capt.lon831311202026.topix_britain_bush_lon8313.jpg



To Timber: As I'm certain you know, George Santayana once wrote that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it;" and I do wonder why people don't understand the present does not exist in a vacuum...BTW, I'm still waiting to be crushed :wink: .
0 Replies
 
nimh
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Nov, 2003 11:02 am
Steve (as 41oo) wrote:
this is a serious question(s)

If we stop annoying them will they stop killing us, or are they determined to go on and on until the Great Satan and its running dog (well poodle) are defeated and Sharia law prevails world wide?

Blair says you can't negotiate with these people. But I would really like to find out what it is they would like us to do or not do which would make them stop killing us.

Alternatively are the outrages just symptoms of an underlying disease, and if so what is that disease, and how do we cure it?


Steve

My answer to that broad question is more or less already encapsulated by this post and this post in response to Gautam yesterday.

Theres a hard core of militants who believe that this world is corrupt and sinful and that a new one has to be brought about by any means necessary. They wont be reconciled with any compromise.

They are part of a broader Islamist ("fundamentalist") movement which basically thinks the same but wouldnt necessarily stoop to terrorism to achieve its goals (Turkey's currently governing party providing the example of how Islamists can turn pragmatically Democratic).

Both groups derive their support(ers) partly on the basis of the resentment and desparation fostered by the Middle East's corrupt, (semi-)totalitarian regimes, the Western (and Soviet) foreign policies that propped them up and the sheer chaos of warlord-fuelled civil war in countries like Afghanistan and Algeria.

They get them thanks to the seemingly total lack of other alternatives to turn to when disgusted by the current regimes and the societies they have wrought, now that the socialists have faltered and "democrats" have come to be associated with the foreign powers who prop up those regimes, not to mention the (to them) infuriating Israeli occupation of Palestine.

They also, however, derive their support(ers) partly from (the teaching and indoctrination of) religious zealotism and hate, a messianistic fervour and promises of a holy world awaiting those who fight, which will easily sway those who see no perspective in their current life, and were raised in societies where an open mindset was not necessarily fostered from early youth in any case.

Now the extremists / terrorists are one problem, and there's little to compromise with the most radical of them, like Al-Qaeda. But they will only 'float up' and gain a prominence far beyond the percentage of people they actually mobilise if they get to thrive on a general political situation. For example on politics that turn potential bystanders into sympathisers and potential opponents into bystanders. A policy that brands every Islamist a terrorist and every Muslim an Islamist, for example, or any other brand of "with us or against us" politics that will punish those who were not actually involved themselves in some kind of assignment of collective guilt, will chase ever more "neutrals" into the bitter camp of extremists, and will discourage those who might have become active in the fight against the extremists from getting involved.

No Western compromise can assuage Al-Qaeda. There is only one way to deal with the actual extremists. But you need a two-pronged (?) strategy to make sure to win over those who are still somewhere in the middle, instead of alienating them and therewith creating a favourable surrounding for the Al-Qaedas to submerge themselves in, hide in.

ILZ and I had a very good discussion on these matters in, unexpectedly, the Guantanamo thread, from this post onwards. It was really interesting! Hobit, Sofia and I think Thomas chipped in, too. I concluded that "Oddly enough, the popularity of fundamentalism is [actually] an expression of democratic frustration."
0 Replies
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  1  
Reply Fri 21 Nov, 2003 11:04 am
Eh, Suzette, that pic isn't meant ironical - it was one, if not THE, main event yesterday evening at the demonstration in London!
0 Replies
 
 

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