US AND THEM: US, UN & Iraq, version 8.0

Cycloptichorn wrote:

Wow, I'm surprised you posted that, Ican.
Considering what it says, yaknow, about how Iraq is sliding towards civil war.
Surprise Hmm!
Whether I like it or not, it's an important opinion that must be taken into account. Assuming it's true, look what it tells us. The malignancy in Iraq now is made up mostly of Suni desperate to sabotage the Iraqi democracy. Suppose we let them succeed. It's highly probable they will resume a Saddam-like or Saddam-actual regime. If that happens al Qaeda will regain safe sanctuary for its training bases in Iraq. If that happens, then mass murder of civilians will within a short time probably significantly increase worldwide.

That says we better damn well not let the Suni succeed. In other words, we better exterminate the malignancy. That in turn says to me we better persevere and do what it takes to secure democracy in Iraq no matter what the cost.


In fact, you agree with it so much that you posted it twice
I posted it twice? Where? I don't deserve credit for the repetition in the article itself. The author deserves it instead
Cycloptichorn

Independent
Iraq's top Shia cleric warns of 'genocidal war'
By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad
Published: 19 July 2005

The slaughter of hundreds of civilians by suicide bombers shows that a "genocidal war" is threatening Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the
country's most influential Shia cleric, warned yesterday.

So far he has persuaded most of his followers not to respond in kind against the Sunni, from whom the bombers are drawn, despite repeated massacres of Shia. But sectarian divisions between Shia and Sunni are deepening across Iraq after the killing of 18 children in the district of New Baghdad last week and the death of 98 people caught by the explosion of a gas tanker in the market town of Musayyib. Many who died were visiting a Shia mosque.

There are also calls for the formation of militias to protect Baghdad neighbourhoods. Khudayr al-Khuzai, a Shia member of parliament, said the
time had come to "bring back popular militias". He added: "The plans of the interior and the defence ministries to impose security in Iraq have failed
to stop the terrorists."

Against the wishes of the Grand Ayatollah, who has counselled restraint, some Shia have started retaliatory killings of members of the former regime, most of whom but not all are Sunni. Some carrying out the attacks appear to
belong to the 12,000-strong paramilitary police commandos. Mystery surrounds many killings. A former general in Saddam Hussein's army called Akram Ahmed Rasul al-Bayati and his two sons, Ali, a policeman, and Omar were arrested
by police commandos 10 days ago. Omar was released and one of his uncles paid $7,000 for the release of the other two. But when he went to get them he saw them taken out of a car and shot dead.

Fear of Shia death squads, perhaps secretly controlled by the Badr Brigade, the leading Shia militia, frightens the Sunni. The patience of the Shia is wearing very thin. But their leaders want them to consolidate their strength within the government after their election victory in January.

The radical Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mehdi Army militia twice fought US troops, has called for restraint. "The occupation itself is the
problem," he said. "Iraq not being independent is the problem. And the other problems stem from that - from sectarianism to civil war. The entire
American presence causes this."

The suicide bombings show increasing sophistication. The casualty figures from Musayyib were so horrific because the bomber blew himself up beside a fuel tanker which had been stolen two days earlier and pre-positioned in the centre of the town.

The repetition begins here
The slaughter of hundreds of civilians by suicide bombers shows that a "genocidal war" is threatening Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the
country's most influential Shia cleric, warned yesterday.

So far he has persuaded most of his followers not to respond in kind against the Sunni, from whom the bombers are drawn, despite repeated massacres of Shia. But sectarian divisions between Shia and Sunni are deepening across Iraq after the killing of 18 children in the district of New Baghdad last week and the death of 98 people caught by the explosion of a gas tanker in the market town of Musayyib. Many who died were visiting a Shia mosque.

There are also calls for the formation of militias to protect Baghdad neighbourhoods. Khudayr al-Khuzai, a Shia member of parliament, said the
time had come to "bring back popular militias". He added: "The plans of the interior and the defence ministries to impose security in Iraq have failed
to stop the terrorists."

Against the wishes of the Grand Ayatollah, who has counselled restraint, some Shia have started retaliatory killings of members of the former regime, most of whom but not all are Sunni. Some carrying out the attacks appear to belong to the 12,000-strong paramilitary police commandos. Mystery surrounds many killings. A former general in Saddam Hussein's army called Akram Ahmed
Rasul al-Bayati and his two sons, Ali, a policeman, and Omar were arrested by police commandos 10 days ago. Omar was released and one of his uncles
paid $7,000 for the release of the other two. But when he went to get them he saw them taken out of a car and shot dead.

Fear of Shia death squads, perhaps secretly controlled by the Badr Brigade, the leading Shia militia, frighten the Sunni. The patience of the Shia is wearing very thin. But their leaders want them to consolidate their strength within the government after their election victory in January.

The radical Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mehdi Army militia twice fought US troops, has called for restraint. "The occupation itself is the
problem," he said. "Iraq not being independent is the problem. And the other problems stem from that - from sectarianism to civil war. The entire
American presence causes this."

The suicide bombings show increasing sophistication. The casualty figures from Musayyib were so horrific because the bomber blew himself up beside a fuel tanker which had been stolen two days earlier and pre-positioned in the centre of the town.

The ultimate targets of the London bombings were not, of course, human beings. Rather, they were a set of governmental policies that the terrorists hoped to change by separating political leaders from the support of their shaken citizenry. Despite this distinction, however, the underlying psychological principles involved in investigating such crimes remain the same as they would be were we studying a mass- or or serial-murder case, of which terrorists are in many respects the politicized version. Is this to say that the four young men suspected of being the instruments of terror on this occasion can be classified as clinical sociopaths? We will unlikely to be able to answer that question with certainty, now that they are dead. What we can focus on, however, are the motivations and perversities of the vastly more dangerous Islamist clerics and terrorist organizers who sought out youthful pawns and instilled in them a theology of murder.

Many political analysts have long been anxious to exclude terrorists from psychological profiling. Some fear that such scrutiny undermines the rationalization that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" (as indeed it does), while others worry that focus on the mental pathologies of terrorists will detract from whatever legitimacy their causes may hold -- just as the psychosis of Hitler overshadowed Germany's grievances about excessive war reparations. But Hitler did not redress injustices against his nation, he prostituted them to his meglomaniacal visions. In the same way, the preachers of Islamist terror are less interested in securing prosperity and dignity for their people than they are in finding new communities of human instruments that they can enlist in their demented campaign to turn History's clock back. In all such cases of international criminal psychology, we have no choice but to move beyond police work and questions of political motive, and reach for the tools of the forensic psychologist -- most importantly, the art of profiling.

But it is not only or even primarily the killers and their tutors that must be so examined. Thorough profiling demands that we also study the victims, who in cases of terrorism are whole societies. The point is not to see these societies as they actually are, but as the planners of the outrage saw them. In this particular case, we must try to understand why a terrorist group associated to at least a degree with al Qaeda was suddenly inspired to move beyond the general desire of that organization's leadership to punish Britain; why, that is, such an affiliate became overwhelmingly convinced that at this particular moment, British citizens were not only deserving of the usual terrorist brand of ritualized bloodshed, but would prove, more importantly, willing to gratify al Qaeda's demands in the wake of the bombings. What had these Islamist organizers seen, as they stalked through the land that had so unwisely given them asylum, that convinced not only them, but their acolytes, that the time had come for a more-than-rhetorical assault on Britains people?
...

Nations that experience collective psychological crises frequently attempt such re-inventions, just as do individuals. By revising the facts surrounding irrationally violent incidents so that they themselves are somehow made responsible for them, victims often seek to exert some kind of control over if, when, and how their tormentors will inflict their random cruelty. But what British citizens who have participated in this revision of the historical record do not realize -- just as Americans in 2001, Turks in 2003, and Spaniards in 2004 did not -- is that showing fear and self-disparagement in the face of al Qaeda's threats only marks the society in question as a suitable candidate for attack. Sociopaths revel most in assaulting terrified, submissive victims; and a Britain so concerned with avoiding attack that its ordinarily wise citizenry would give voice to the kind of simplistic thinking expressed in the media in recent months evidently fit that description to an extent irresistible to al Qaeda's minions within its borders.

...

But whatever the ultimate reaction of the British people to these latest terrorist outrages, we must hope that American intellectuals and celebrities will not emulate Britain's recent exercises in wavering, revisionist behavior. Already there has been unfortunate evidence that the tendency to "blame the victim" after July 7 was greater in America than it was in Britain. Such words and actions only cause the scent that emerges from our own communities to become that of fear -- and should al Qaeda again detect such an odor inside our borders, we may expect attacks such as those that struck our oldest and most trusted ally to once more visit our own shores. And we may expect them very soon.

Mr. Carr is author of "The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians," and "The Atheist." He teaches military history at Bard.

Evil Within
The Enemy Is Not Far from Home

By Michael A. Ledeen
National Review Online

Publication Date: July 19, 2005

That the London killers were native Brits surprised a lot of people, which is testimony to our capacity to forget our own history. The 7/7 terrorists were neither the first British terrorists (take Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber," for example), nor the first terrorists born and bred in a Western democracy. The executioner of Daniel Pearl was a textbook British Establishment sort, having been well raised and educated (he had studied at the prestigious London School of Economics) by a good family. He went to secular schools, he was exceedingly upward-mobile, he did not suffer any deprivations or traumatizing slights from infidels. One day, in a mosque, he made a free decision to become a terrorist. All of this has been known for years, and it is quite easy to compile a long list of native American, British, French, German, Spanish, and Italian terrorists--suicide and otherwise. Mohammed Bouyari, the assassin of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, was born and bred in the Netherlands. And our own "Johnny Jihad" was the product of wealthy families in a stylish neighborhood in San Francisco, who went to Afghanistan to kill fellow Americans.

These facts were known, but got relegated to that part of the spirit that shelters active thought from unpleasant truths. The knowledge that our societies contain people ready to kill us had not penetrated the awareness of the British people, and, with them, countless Europeans and Americans.

Why were so many well-educated and well-informed people surprised, even shocked? Why were the facts ignored? Many of them have provided an "explanation": They believed that people raised in cultured, democratic, societies--whatever their ethnic background and whatever their political or religious beliefs--are immune to the emotional poisons that transform normal people into terrorists. No doubt the belief was, and in many cases remains, genuine. But this intellectual conceit--which underlies a vast multicultural enterprise that dominates media and schools and universities throughout the Western world--totally ignores the history of the West. It is as if fascism and Communism--products of the finest European societies--never happened, or that, even if they happened, they were anomalies (Benedetto Croce called Italian fascism "a parenthesis") that didn’t really matter for the purposes of understanding human nature and human society, and of crafting suitable policies.

George Orwell got it just right when, in the winter of 1940, he bitterly observed "highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me." He knew what his countrymen, and most of the intellectual elite of the West, have relegated to a quiet intellectual closet: that Hitler and Mussolini had created monstrous mass movements in two of the most civilized, and most cultured countries in Europe. The Duce and the Fuhrer were wildly popular in the countries of Dante and Vivaldi, Beethoven and Goethe; they were not the products of some alien culture. They sprang from the most profound beliefs and passions of the highest cultures in the world (and those passions and beliefs spread to France and England, as well as to central and eastern Europe), which is why there was hardly any effective popular resistance in fascist Europe. The great evil was only abandoned by the Europeans when it was defeated on the battlefield.

The horrors of Communism have been similarly removed from active memory, albeit through a slightly different mind game. The ideals of Communism are still unaccountably admired in our popular culture--just a few days ago the Brits themselves voted Karl Marx (who lived in London for many years) the greatest intellectual in recent times--even though it is grudgingly admitted that it worked out badly in practice. This sort of deception sank to dramatic depths in Italy during the dark years of the Red Brigades terrorists, when the leaders of Europe’s most sophisticated Communist party proclaimed the brigadiers "misguided comrades."

Both fascism and Communism inspired mass murder and individual martyrdom for "the cause," just as radical Islam does today. Like Osama bin Laden and his ilk, Hitler and his cohorts raged against the democracies. Both blamed the free peoples for Germany’s and the Muslims’ misery and bragged of the superiority of Aryans and Muslims over decadent, corrupt, and self-indulgent free men and women. Stalin went one step further, blaming democratic capitalism for the misery of the entire world, while proclaiming the superiority of the new Soviet man.

There are many ideologies and many charismatic leaders who can inspire blind loyalty, often accompanied by equally blind hatred, even to the point of self-immolation. The operational model for the suicide terrorists of today comes from Japan’s kamikazes--soldiers from a highly civilized country--in the Second World War. Freedom and democracy do not protect us against such people; Indeed, in the past century, free nations elevated them to power, and kept them there until we dominated them. The evil can't be explained by economic misery, or social alienation, or even by the doctrines adopted by the terrorists. The problem lies within us.

Nasra Hassan, who interviewed terrorists and their families, noted in Saturday’s London Times that

None of the suicide bombers--they ranged in age from 18 to 38--conformed to the typical profile of the suicidal personality. None of them was uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded, or depressed. Many were middle-class and held paying jobs. Two were the sons of millionaires. They all seemed entirely normal members of their families. They were polite and serious, and in their communities were considered to be model youths. Most were bearded. All were deeply religious...

To be sure, those terrorists came from Palestinian camps--not from London or San Francisco or Amsterdam, but we can recognize the London bombers, and the Amsterdam killer, and the San Francisco jihadi. They are not misfits or sociopaths. They are people who find it fulfilling to kill us and destroy our society. As time passes, we will meet more and more of them. And, in the fullness of time, we will remember that Machiavelli warned us half a millennium ago that "man is more inclined to do evil than to do good," and that the primary role of statesmen and other leaders is to contain the dark forces of human nature. Evil cannot be "fixed" by some social program or suitably energetic public-affairs strategy, or by "reaching out" to our misguided comrades. It must be dominated.

Otherwise it will dominate us.

Michael Ledeen is the Freedom Scholar at AEI.

When confronted with the problem of driving a nail into a very hard surface, it will frequently help to first drill a hole in the surface, then use a heavy hammar to drive in a strong nail.


When confronted by a hard problem,
some attempt to solve it;
Others attempt to escape it.

The ultimate targets of the London bombings were not, of course, human beings. Rather, they were a set of governmental policies that the terrorists hoped to change by separating political leaders from the support of their shaken citizenry. Despite this distinction, however, the underlying psychological principles involved in investigating such crimes remain the same as they would be were we studying a mass- or or serial-murder case, of which terrorists are in many respects the politicized version. Is this to say that the four young men suspected of being the instruments of terror on this occasion can be classified as clinical sociopaths? We will unlikely to be able to answer that question with certainty, now that they are dead. What we can focus on, however, are the motivations and perversities of the vastly more dangerous Islamist clerics and terrorist organizers who sought out youthful pawns and instilled in them a theology of murder.

Many political analysts have long been anxious to exclude terrorists from psychological profiling. Some fear that such scrutiny undermines the rationalization that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" (as indeed it does), while others worry that focus on the mental pathologies of terrorists will detract from whatever legitimacy their causes may hold -- just as the psychosis of Hitler overshadowed Germany's grievances about excessive war reparations. But Hitler did not redress injustices against his nation, he prostituted them to his meglomaniacal visions. In the same way, the preachers of Islamist terror are less interested in securing prosperity and dignity for their people than they are in finding new communities of human instruments that they can enlist in their demented campaign to turn History's clock back. In all such cases of international criminal psychology, we have no choice but to move beyond police work and questions of political motive, and reach for the tools of the forensic psychologist -- most importantly, the art of profiling.

But it is not only or even primarily the killers and their tutors that must be so examined. Thorough profiling demands that we also study the victims, who in cases of terrorism are whole societies. The point is not to see these societies as they actually are, but as the planners of the outrage saw them. In this particular case, we must try to understand why a terrorist group associated to at least a degree with al Qaeda was suddenly inspired to move beyond the general desire of that organization's leadership to punish Britain; why, that is, such an affiliate became overwhelmingly convinced that at this particular moment, British citizens were not only deserving of the usual terrorist brand of ritualized bloodshed, but would prove, more importantly, willing to gratify al Qaeda's demands in the wake of the bombings. What had these Islamist organizers seen, as they stalked through the land that had so unwisely given them asylum, that convinced not only them, but their acolytes, that the time had come for a more-than-rhetorical assault on Britains people?

* * *

These questions will not be answered by focusing on the grievances by which the terrorists later claimed to have been propelled: The sociopath's motivations are revealed in his behavior, not in his grandiose self-justifications. Therefore, we must put the issue of the timing of the bombings into the context of the series of similar crimes that have been committed by al Qaeda and its subordinates during the long and deadly spree that they have pursued since the 1990s. Only a few examples from al Qaeda's catalogue of outrages resemble the London attack, in specific purpose and method, enough to be of real use in establishing this pattern. These few are: the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001; the bombings of a synagogue, the British consulate, and a Western bank in Istanbul in November 2003; and the Madrid bombings in March 2004. What common elements can we establish among these societies at the given moments that they were victimized?

Of paramount interest is the fact that each nation had recently exhibited a weakening public determination to aggressively meet the rising challenge of Islamist terrorism. Consider the U.S. of 2001: The Clinton administration had left behind a record of essentially ignoring those few terrorism analysts who asserted that full-fledged military action against al Qaeda's Afghan training bases, backed by the possibility of military strikes against other terrorist sponsor states, was the only truly effective method of preventing an eventual attack within U.S. borders. President Clinton himself, we now know, at times favored such decisive moves; but opposition from various members of his cabinet, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and finally (as well as most importantly) a general public that would not or could not confront the true extent of the Islamist problem generally, and al Qaeda specifically, forced him to confine his responses to occassional and counterproductive bombings -- even as the death toll from al Qaeda attacks on U.S. interests abroad rose dramatically. Correctly sensing that the new president, George W. Bush, was treating the terrorist threat with a similar attitude of denial, al Qaeda's Hamburg-based subsidiaries launched the 9/11 operation.

...


Nations that experience collective psychological crises frequently attempt such re-inventions, just as do individuals. By revising the facts surrounding irrationally violent incidents so that they themselves are somehow made responsible for them, victims often seek to exert some kind of control over if, when, and how their tormentors will inflict their random cruelty. But what British citizens who have participated in this revision of the historical record do not realize -- just as Americans in 2001, Turks in 2003, and Spaniards in 2004 did not -- is that showing fear and self-disparagement in the face of al Qaeda's threats only marks the society in question as a suitable candidate for attack. Sociopaths revel most in assaulting terrified, submissive victims; and a Britain so concerned with avoiding attack that its ordinarily wise citizenry would give voice to the kind of simplistic thinking expressed in the media in recent months evidently fit that description to an extent irresistible to al Qaeda's minions within its borders.

...


But whatever the ultimate reaction of the British people to these latest terrorist outrages, we must hope that American intellectuals and celebrities will not emulate Britain's recent exercises in wavering, revisionist behavior. Already there has been unfortunate evidence that the tendency to "blame the victim" after July 7 was greater in America than it was in Britain. Such words and actions only cause the scent that emerges from our own communities to become that of fear -- and should al Qaeda again detect such an odor inside our borders, we may expect attacks such as those that struck our oldest and most trusted ally to once more visit our own shores. And we may expect them very soon.

Mr. Carr is author of "The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians," and "The Atheist." He teaches military history at Bard.

ican711nm wrote:

When confronted with the problem of driving a nail into a very hard surface, it will frequently help to first drill a hole in the surface, then use a heavy hammar to drive in a strong nail.


When confronted by a hard problem,
some attempt to solve it;
Others attempt to escape it.

yeppers ican drilling a bore hole for the nail is looking at alternative solutions rather than just grabbing a bigger hammer. George Armstrong Custer was convinced he had the bigger hammer when he uttered his final words "take no prisoners men, we must erradicate the malignancies" He found an arrow where his bore hole used to be.

...
Custer ... we must erradicate the malignancies ...

Did the enjuns have any of them there "malignancies'?

Gelisgesti wrote:

Did the enjuns have any of them there "malignancies'?

"Yeppers!"

Some of them were themselves malignancies.