Our War is not against Terrorism

If there is a warehouse full of documentation full of Saddam supporting terrorist other than Palestinians it should be easy to offer up the proof.

I mean a real link between Saddam and a terrorist such as Bin Laden who was behind 9/11 where Saddam actually gave money to Al queada. (however you spell it) I don't mean simply the fact that there are some Al queda or such terrorist groups in Iraq since there are even Terrorist in our country and we are not supporting terrorist.

They don't have training camps setup running fake hostage taking drills here. They are hiding amongst the populace. You don't see a difference there?

also, I believe Bush made his intentions clear on our invasion of Iraq. It wasn't really a surprise attack... Saddam had many opportunities to acquiesce.

Well Adrian I do know what a Venn diagram is. But while it follows logically that all Muslims are not terrorists just because a lot of terrorism is carried out by Muslims, you have to realise that the serious terrorist if he's got any sense, will go out of his way to appear to be an "ordinary" Muslim.

Its not the firebrand imans that blow themselves up. Its the disaffected youth they recruit who do that. The 911 group were given special dispensation to drink alcohol and encouraged to act in ways designed to divert attention from themselves as Muslims.

BBB
I could agree if John Lehman's thesis included fundamentalists of all religions. This would include Christian, Jewish and other religions that have produced radical violent terrorists, and there are thousands that fit that meaning. Its in the nature of fundamentalism.

BBB

A comparison between Al Sistani and Al Sadr immediately comes to mind.

See a difference from what? You are not referring to Ansar al-Islam are you?

Phoenix

Your excellent link provides several worthwhile points and I encourage everyone to read it. Excerpts follow that support the contention that Iraq has become a battle ground for the terrorists:

"And the Iraq conflict "has arguably focused the energies and resources of al-Qaida and its followers while diluting those of the global counterterrorism coalition that appeared so formidable" after the Afghan intervention, the survey said.

The U.S. occupation of Iraq brought al-Qaida recruits from across Islamic nations, the study said. Up to 1,000 foreign Islamic fighters have infiltrated Iraqi territory, where they are cooperating with Iraqi insurgents, the survey said".

Steissd

Let me ask you a question that pertains to this:

Do you agree with the latest reports that Iran has a masterful spy program and have been manipulating the US and Brittain by feeding false info to Chalabi?????

I cannot agree or disagree, since I do not know all the truth: I do not belong to any of the intelligence communities in the world. But this seems being quite probable. I am not sure that this was done through Chalabi: accusations toward him might also have been masterminded in Tehran in order to compromise a pro-American politician.

Fedral writes, "We can easily identify fundamentalist Muslims":



Right.

So first a strike back at the terrorists who committed 9/11 is redefined as an overall "war against terror".

That's neat, cause it can include Saddam, who had nothing to do with 9/11 whatsoever, but was known to have supported terrorists. Like, Palestinian terrorists. Will do.

Then, the "war on terror" is redefined as a war against all violent Islamic fundamentalists.

This kinda takes Saddam out of the loop, but he's gone already, anyway, so no matter.

Then "violent Islamic fundamentalists" are to be recognized by how - gasp - they hate America.

Now, everybody who is anti-American = legit goal in the "war on terror".

Wow.

My thought here was to use a combination of religious pressure from the moderate religious leaders within a country, and political/law enforcement pressure from the government within a country. Sistani told Sadr to get out of Fallujah and it worked, for example. I don't know who the Islamic "players" are so I can't make a guess who would be the right people to approach. But maybe that's the beauty of the system - I don't have to know the internal politics or religious heirarchy within a country. All I have to know is the leader's phone number. I can call him and say "This is George Bush. We've been having considerable trouble with some extremists from your country killing people from our country. Could you take care of that please?" The country's leader contacts moderate religious leaders and they all sit down and talk. Then the moderate religious leaders go out and preach the gospel of non-violence to the extremists and make them stop teaching little kids to hate non-Muslims. The religious groups within the country excommunicate or otherwise forbid the extremists from practicing their own perversion of the religion, and the extremists lose all their followers.

I suppose it sounds rather simplistic, but my question is...why hasn't this been happening already? Are there no moderate Islamics available with the courage to speak out against terrorism?

To take a break from partisan indignation ...



One obstacle is that many of the region's political leaders are dictators or at best authoritarian rulers, who as often as not have an extremely tense relationship with the country's religious leaders, constituting as they do a rival centre of power.

In some cases, this has led the state leaders to clamp down on any all too popular religious leader, tolerating only fully compliant figure-heads instead. Bad idea in the long-term, since it drives any such leader's followers into the ever more vibrant underground, militant camp. Which is basically what you've seen happening in the Arab world the past ten or fifteen years.

This poses traps for religious leaders as well. Popular religious leaders who dare dissent once in a while have to watch out about "sitting down" with the state leaders, since they'd lose their popular appeal if they get too closely associated with the regime. Those who have accepted their subservient position and do regularly sit down and talk with the regime, usually have little sway over the people you want to stop from "teaching little kids to hate non-Muslims".

(I don't think many of the angry Muslims you see really hate "non-Muslims", btw, your standard fare of pre-modern religious intolerance aside. The only ones they really seem to hate are Americans and Israelis.)

Basically, your solution is geared to democracies. In the Middle-East, many states have a lot of repressive power, but little persuasive legitimacy. That's why they are bad or ineffective at "round tables" with popular religious leaders. Instead they apply a mix of letting stuff go by if it doesnt directly threaten them, and clamping down violently if it does. Both tactics benefit the militants, in the end.

I'm generalising, of course. But in many Arab states, these are the patterns that get in the way.

---

Then there's the question of reciprocity of course. When you watch TV, you see hateful kids chanting "death to America" on TV, growing up to be militants. So you want to ask your counterpart in Arabia to call up the religious leaders in his country, tell them to stop teaching kids to hate America. But when they watch TV, they see zealotic colonists and heavy-armed soldiers bulldozering Palestinians' houses and shooting at Palestinian kids.

Now I'm not going to get into which of those two images properly reflects reality or not. But you should count on your counterpart telling you, "well, now that you ask, I have a question of my own. My religious leaders would have a very hard time stopping the hate even if they'd want to, as long as the images of dead Palestinian kids keep flowing in. Can you call your ally and ask him to stop occupying that country?"

BM

I have been assuming that bin Laden and al Queda are the product of the Wahhabi sect of Islam-----this may be incorrect. My thinking was influenced by the Book "Hatreds Kingdom" by Dore Gold which alleges that Wahhabism it the originator of the form of Radical militant Islam that we are fighting. The link below is to the Wahhabi web site and of course will be feeding biased information but after reading several pages is has opened my mind. They are very convincing in their refutation and say this instead( see below). I am skeptical because I cannot believe "Hatreds Kingdom" is a lie, so I invite you all to decide for yourselves.
Note the references to "The Muslim Brotherhood" which also has an Egyptian Origin.

What Sect Does Osama Bin Laden Really Belong to?

"…But if one man deserves the title of intellectual grandfather to Osama bin Laden and his fellow terrorists, it is probably the Egyptian writer and activist Sayyid Qutb."

The article goes on to say:

The Existence of Qutbism as an Ideology

In an article titled "Terror, Islam and Democracy," Ladan and Roya Boroumand correctly state that "Most young Islamist cadres today are the direct intellectual and spiritual heirs of the Qutbist wing of the Muslim Brotherhood."

They state that: "When the authoritarian regime of President Gamel Abdel Nasser suppressed the Muslim Brothers in 1954 (it would eventually get around to hanging Qutb in 1966), many went into exile in Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria and Morocco. From there, they spread their revolutionary Islamist ideas - including the organizational and ideological tools borrowed from European totalitarianism."

Expanding upon the link between European revolutionary ideologies and the dogma of Qutbism, The Independent's John Gray argues in an article entitled "How Marx turned Muslim" that Qutbism is not rooted in the Islamic tradition, but rather, is very much a Western based ideology.

He explains that Sayyid Qutb "incorporated many elements derived from European ideology into his thinking," and as such, Qutbism should be seen as an "exotic hybrid, bred from the encounter of sections of the Islamic intelligentsia with radical western ideologies."

Gray explains that Qutbism is a modern revolutionary movement and unrepresentative of the orthodoxy of true Islam:

"The inspiration for Qutb's thought is not so much the Quran, but the current of western philosophy embodied in thinkers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Heidegger. Qutb's thought -- the blueprint for all subsequent radical Islamist political theology -- is as much a response to 20th-century Europe's experience of 'the death of God' as to anything in the Islamic tradition. Qutbism is in no way traditional. Like all fundamentalist ideology, it is unmistakably modern."

Speaking about the incontestable link that exists between Bin Laden and Qutbism, the Arab News' Amir Taheri said: "In time, Maudoodo-Qutbism provided the ideological topos in which Bin Ladenism could grow."

Shaykh Rabee' ibn Hadi al-Madkhali, the renowned Salafi scholar who has written several books refuting the mistakes of Sayyid Qutb, concludes the following about Qutbism: "The Qutbists are the followers of Sayyid Qutb… everything you see of the tribulations, the shedding of blood and the problems in the Islamic world today arise from the methodology (of this man)."

- abridged from the book: The 'Wahhabi' Myth




http://www.thewahhabimyth.com/osama_sect.htm

In other words, McGentrix, that was not a true statement unless foxfrye comes up with the names of the witnesses and warehouses full of evidence of Saddam supporting terrorist.

Saddam did not have control of all of Iraq did he? Didn't the kurds and other parts of Iraq manage to keep control of parts of Iraq? Wasn't it in those parts where the training camp and that one known terrorist camp was?

If there was such evidence of Saddam Hussien supporting terrorist other than the Palestinians then I don't think there would have been such a division of the wisdom of going to war with Iraq. There wasn't with Afghanistan.

As for the Prez's reasoning on going to war with Iraq, it was ever changing. However I think by this late date putting all the pieces together I have concluded that the reason was that they thought they could change the shape of middle east by force so that we and Israel would be safer. Saddam's brutality was just one of the handy excuses. It was an unjust war that has gone badly because it was an unjust war. We were never personally in any danger from Iraq except by a bunch of ifs and maybes.

Revel,
The warehouse full of evidence amounts to a small steaming pile.

The Ansar Al Islam camp was in the Kurdish controlled autonomous zone. Nothing Sadam could do about it.

Yes, Sadam did openly pay to families of Palestinian martyrs, mostly to help his standing with Arab states. They were no threat to the US.

Then there was Abu Nidal, another notorious Palestinian who was found to have commited suicide in Bagdad by shooting himself in the head four times.

We also have the totally rebuked report of an Iraqi intellience officer meeting with Mohammud Atta. Cheney still can't keep himself from bringing that one up.

I believe you are dead on about the real reason for going to war. The plan was pretty much laid out by PNAC (Project for a New American Century) in 1999.

I'm going to ask you to substantiate that, although I'm sure you will not, prefering to stay comfy in conjecture instead.

Don't forget to explain how, all relevent factors considered, Hussien's links to terror overshadow those of a multitude of other Muslim nations - such as, say, Saudi Arabia, as the speech you are supporting alluded too.

In any case, I agree with most of what Lehmenn said. Although that terrorism = violent fundamentalist Islamic fundamentalism seems a little facile.

Terrorism may stem from fundamentaslism but fundamentalism stems from a number of issues - historical misgivings, poverty, and yes, American foriegn policy and the universalist attitude of Western culture in general.

Further, terrorism and fundamentalism is just the tip of a much bigger iceburg - the general anti-American sentiment in the Middle East. And they are not all cave-dwelling, reckless, irrational radicals. I'd argue that much of what motivates the fundamentalist movements in the Middle East are legitimate issues they have with America.

The way many Americans like to pigeonhole the entire anti-American movement as being a bunch of isolated radicals is only hurting us by blinding us to reality and thus preventing an efficacious foriegn policy from being crafted.

Military power will certainly help us achieve our ends, but there is also a long list of non-military actions that need to be taken to help counter the anti-American sentiment that is often at the root of these problems.

I know I have a few adroit policy shifts in mind.

Toodles.

Care to expand, ILZ?