0
   

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

 
 
Steve 41oo
 
  1  
Reply Mon 1 Aug, 2005 05:53 am
I agree with cyclo that Haas has it back to front

haas says

"They hate us for "who we are," not "what we do.""

Haas clearly has no knowledge of what we have been doing over the course of the last century, to secure oil.
0 Replies
 
revel
 
  1  
Reply Mon 1 Aug, 2005 06:26 am
ican711nm wrote:
LALL versus DAMD

Live And Let Live versus Die And Make Die


Co-existence of LALL and DAMD is an oxymoron.


I take it DAMD replaces malignancy for this month.

Are you seriously saying that we in America just live and let everyone else live without bothering them or interfering with them like the fabled Swiss? I think you should change it something like Live Like US Or Become Our Enemies--LLUOBOE or Give Us All Your Oil For Free And We Will Let Your Live-GUAYOFFAWWLYL

I am not saying the other side is blameless but we are not pure as the driven snow either.
0 Replies
 
ican711nm
 
  1  
Reply Mon 1 Aug, 2005 09:08 am
revel wrote:
ican711nm wrote:
LALL versus DAMD

Live And Let Live versus Die And Make Die


Co-existence of LALL and DAMD is an oxymoron.


I take it DAMD replaces malignancy for this month.

No! DAMD is a doctrine. Malignancy are a group of people striving to live by that doctrine.

Are you seriously saying that we in America just live and let everyone else live without bothering them or interfering with them like the fabled Swiss?

No! Of course not! I am saying that the majority of humanity, including those of us in the US, attempt to live by the doctrine LALL. While all of the malignancy attempts to live by the doctrine DAMD. Does that majority of humanity succeed adequately to live by LALL? No! We lie and steal and murder too much. But I claim that living by LALL is precisely what most of us are striving to do. Does that 100% of the malignancy succeed adequately to live by DAMD? Too many do succeed! But I claim that living by DAMD is precisely what most of them are striving to do.

Yes, the West has unfairly exploited the Middle East for its own gain for at least a century. Is the mass murder of both Middle Eastern and Western civilians by the DAMD thereby justified? I think not!

If members of the malignancy were truly only interested in recovering control of the governance of the Middle East from the West, they could achieve that a lot faster by stopping at least the mass murder of Middle Eastern civilians.


I think you should change it something like Live Like US Or Become Our Enemies--LLUOBOE or Give Us All Your Oil For Free And We Will Let Your Live-GUAYOFFAWWLYL.

It's long past time to stop this childish effort to stereotype the Bush administration. All the Bush administration has declared they want is to conquer those who terrorize and those who are accomplices of those who terrorize. If the Bush administration were shown to actually be working for more than that, they'd be voted out by Democrats and Republicans alike.

I am not saying the other side is blameless but we are not pure as the driven snow either.

I am not saying we are as pure as the driven snow. I am saying that the those attempting to live by the doctrine of DAMD are a threat to the survival of humanity and therefore must be exterminated like any other malignancy.
0 Replies
 
Steve 41oo
 
  1  
Reply Mon 1 Aug, 2005 09:14 am
Well I have another acronym for these people which for the sake of brevity I will call

LLANFAIRPWLLGWYNGYLLGOGERYCHWYRNDROBWLLLANTYSILIOGOGOGOCH
0 Replies
 
Cycloptichorn
 
  1  
Reply Mon 1 Aug, 2005 09:18 am
Quote:
I am not saying we are as pure as the driven snow. I am saying that the those attempting to live by the doctrine of DAMD are a threat to the survival of humanity and therefore must be exterminated like any other malignancy.


Those who worry about exterminating all the time, become malignancies themselves.

Cycloptichorn
0 Replies
 
Ticomaya
 
  1  
Reply Mon 1 Aug, 2005 09:24 am
Steve (as 41oo) wrote:
Well I have another acronym for these people which for the sake of brevity I will call

LLANFAIRPWLLGWYNGYLLGOGERYCHWYRNDROBWLLLANTYSILIOGOGOGOCH


LLANFAIRPWLL, for short?
0 Replies
 
Steve 41oo
 
  1  
Reply Mon 1 Aug, 2005 09:33 am
or LLANFAIR PG

its a whole sentence in Welsh describing a place, which somehow became the place name.
0 Replies
 
wandeljw
 
  1  
Reply Mon 1 Aug, 2005 10:04 am
Cycloptichorn wrote:
Those who worry about exterminating all the time, become malignancies themselves.

Cycloptichorn


Ican,

The above summarizes why some of us are worried by your comments.
0 Replies
 
ican711nm
 
  1  
Reply Mon 1 Aug, 2005 11:30 am
Steve (as 41oo) wrote:
Well I have another acronym for these people which for the sake of brevity I will call

LLANFAIRPWLLGWYNGYLLGOGERYCHWYRNDROBWLLLANTYSILIOGOGOGOCH
Laughing
The first issue is not about acronyms, it's about whether or not those attempting to follow the DAMD doctrine are or are not a threat to the survival of humanity.

If it's concluded that they are such a threat, then the second issue is whether or not their extermination is necessary to end that threat.

If it's concluded that extermination is necessary, then the third issue is how best to exterminate them.

The issue of whether the Bush administration is fraudulent, incompetent, competent, or honest is irrelevant until those first three issues are resolved.
0 Replies
 
ican711nm
 
  1  
Reply Mon 1 Aug, 2005 12:30 pm
wandeljw wrote:
Cycloptichorn wrote:
Those who worry about exterminating all the time, become malignancies themselves.

Cycloptichorn


Ican,

The above summarizes why some of us are worried by your comments.


Of course anyone is free to define the word malignancy (using boldface and italics as I do) any way they want.

I have defined malignancy (using boldface and italics) to be: Those people who mass murder civilians and those people who are accomplices of those who mass murder civilians.

Those people like myself who seek the extermination of malignancies are by definition not malignancies themselves unless they mass murder civilians and/or serve as accomplices of those who mass murder civilians. Those people, if any, who in the act of exterminating malignancies become malignancies should likewise be exterminated.

I infer that you find my recommendation not only worisome but also frightening. Well I am frightened by your apparent reluctance to recognize that because malignancies are a severe danger to the survival of humanity, they must be exterminated.

The reality is that the doctrines LALL (i.e., Live And Let Live) and DAMD (i.e., Die And Make Die) cannot coexist: their differences cannot be negotiated away. Those who strive to follow DAMD are malignancies and like any other malignancies must be exterminated to stop them from murdering those following LALL. Otherwise, those of our posterity seeking to follow the doctrine LALL will not survive to do so. I'd rather those seeking to follow DAMD not survive.
0 Replies
 
ican711nm
 
  1  
Reply Mon 1 Aug, 2005 01:09 pm
Cycloptichorn wrote:
Quote:
I am not saying we are as pure as the driven snow. I am saying that the those attempting to live by the doctrine of DAMD are a threat to the survival of humanity and therefore must be exterminated like any other malignancy.


Those who worry about exterminating all the time, become malignancies themselves.

Cycloptichorn


Who is it that worries "about exterminating all the time?"

What evidence do you have that such worriers become malignancies themselves?

Much of the time I worry about the lives of those civilians threatened by malignancy. Malignancy = those people who mass murder civilians and those people who are accomplices of those who mass murder civilians.

That leads me to frequently worry about how to exterminate malignancies. I have not murdered anyone and shall not murdered anyone. I have not served as an accomplice to anyone who has murdered anyone, and shall not serve as an accomplice to anyone who has murdered anyone.

Much of the time, many medical doctors worry about how to exterminate malignancies and take such action as they think will work to infact exterminate those malignancies. Do they thereby become malignancies? I think not!

Bug pest controllers worry about how to exterminate bug pests much of the time and take such action as they think will work to infact exterminate those bug pests. Do they thereby become malignancies? I think not!
0 Replies
 
ican711nm
 
  1  
Reply Mon 1 Aug, 2005 01:33 pm
Cycloptichorn wrote:
Haas is dead wrong. He has the argument exactly backwards.

Sheesh

Cycloptichorn


Haas has it exactly right!

Nothing the civilians being mass murdered, or the civilians who will be mass murdered, have done justifies their mass murder. Nothing!

It is terrifying that you actually think otherwise. It is even more terrifying that you and other people who think like you, because of such thinking might eventually evolve into malignancies yourselves.

Goodgodgerty!
0 Replies
 
ican711nm
 
  1  
Reply Mon 1 Aug, 2005 01:48 pm
American Committees on Foreign Relations, ACFR NewsGroup, Monday, August 1, 2005, distibuted, and author wrote:


July 28, 2005 Edition > Section: Foreign <http://www.nysun.com/section/6> > Printer-Friendly Version
Muslim 'Moderates' And Terrorism
BY FIAMMA NIRENSTEIN
July 28, 2005
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/17686

SHARM EL-SHEIK, Egypt - The poor people dressed in Islamic garb or in dirty blue trousers and T-shirts sitting in 118-degree heat in the hall of the Sharm el-Sheik Hospital were either the brothers, the cousins, or the friends of the people wounded in the terrorist attack of the day before. Just plenty of desperate young people.

No women were there, no mothers, or sisters, or wives. Egyptian women almost don't live in Sharm. The family and children of the workers are in the villages near Cairo, and their beloved men come to visit for one week once a month. Sharm is inhabited by a couple of thousand military people and public officials that President Mubarak, just like President Sadat, keeps as a defense vanguard near his own villa; or by poor workers, waiters, drivers, plumbers, and cooks - lots of day laborers that serve the enormous tourism business. Only a large group of very poor workers, the other face of the holiday town of Sharm el-Sheik, have been the killed and the wounded here.

You understand many things about terrorism when you speak to them; and you understand also, unfortunately, why we will never be able to count on what we call "the moderate Muslims" for the war against terrorism.

What you learn about terrorism from the poor of Sharm, if you still didn't know it, is that its cruelty has no limits, no excuses, and no historical explanation, but only a cold ideological background.

The terrorists know that the men they kill, wound, and destroy economically have nothing to do with imperialism, occupation, Palestine, Iraq, colonialism, and all the other explanations that the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, finds to explain their crimes. They know who the hundreds they are going to kill are: people who sleep 10 (exactly!) to a room, with no bathroom, one toilet, and one little kitchen; people who define themselves as "good Muslims," go the mosques once a week, pray three times a day, and when they forget, says Khaled, it is because they work too much or it is too hot; people who after the terrorist attack tremble because they will have no work anymore, now that the tourist season is destroyed and this will make them lose their $100 a month wage in the best cases for a family of five, six, 10 children.

These guys are the typical "moderate Muslim" that the holy rage of the jihadists destroys with fury, the one infected by the contact with the West and also the one that in our Western dreams and in many European and American experts' analyses should suddenly rise against the extreme Islam, their enemy.

So, let's test this thesis and ask: "Do they hate terrorists?" The answer is "Yes, very much so," and they really do, - they close their fists and watch in rage and repeat to me that they deeply hope that Mr. Mubarak will catch them all, will put them in prison, will kill them. Are they ready to fight them? Yes, at every level, with their hands, if requested, and with demonstrations that actually, while I'm in Sharm, suddenly appear in the hot streets and just in front of the cameras of the international press: "Down with terrorism," "We are against terrorism"...

But then, if it's so, why can the great moderate Muslim world not really fight their own enemy? They themselves give me the answers: "Bin Laden? The Muslim Brotherhood? Certainly the terrorist attacks are not their work, no! This is a lie. A Muslim could never do this. And if they say they do it in the name of Islam, they are not Islamic; or, most likely, this shows, like the television says, that someone uses the name of Islam just to hide the real perpetrators."

Anyhow, Islam is out of the question, And then, we ask again, who is behind the attacks? Well, you know the answer, they smile with a smart expression. Mahmoud, who comes from a periphery of Cairo, where he now cannot go back because he doesn't have the money for a bus ticket, knows the answer, and so do all his other friends, about 10, all from the same town, now all together as one, standing in the corridor of the Hospital of Sharm, no air-conditioning, their friend Khaled in bed with a wound in his back ("I was lucky. Nadem had both of his legs amputated," Khaled says).

They know the answer, yes: the television said that only the Israelis and the Americans have a real interest in seeing Egypt on its knees; General Fuad Allam said that the perpetrators of the Taba attack of October 2004 were apparently linked to the Israeli security forces, and so, supposedly, it is today. Also Al-Jazeera and even Al-Arabia interviewed "experts" to confirm this point of view. A big, beautiful guy with a red T-shirt just puts it down bluntly: "We know only what the television tells us."

It's suddenly clear to me that here television is a metaphor for "knowledge" and for "power": printed paper, school texts, Friday sermons in the mosques, everything is "television" for this guy and his hundreds of millions of "moderate Muslim" friends. And everything points to the Israeli as an object of hate. Their poor condition - almost of slaves, of people almost without civil rights and work protections - makes the growth of their knowledge of how things are going a danger for the fascistic power there rules them.

So, we cannot count on "moderate" Arabs, not even on the group of youngsters that I meet later, the girls dressed just like ours: They repeat to me, still with a smart little face, "It cannot be a Muslim, it's certainly the Israelis and the Americans." The dream palace of the Arab, after the terrorist attack in Sharm, just like the thousands of attacks in Iraq and in Israel, is still there; the summer camps of Hamas still teach that it's good to kill the Jews; several madrassas work full time as centers of recruitment; the television broadcasts an "analysis" that charges the Mossad and the CIA with mass murders. The dictators of the Arab countries, in this case Mr. Mubarak, don't let Khaled know who the guys that cut their legs are. So, Khaled can be as "moderate" as we want, but so long as that fascist culture of hate is there, we can count only on ourselves.

Ms. Nirenstein is an Italian journalist.
0 Replies
 
ican711nm
 
  1  
Reply Mon 1 Aug, 2005 02:16 pm
American Committees on Foreign Relations, ACFR NewsGroup, Monday, August 1, 2005, distributed, and author wrote:

Casting the Wrong Blame

By HUSAIN HAQQANI
July 22, 2005

WASHINGTON -- The July 7 terrorist attacks in London should have focused Europe's attention on the small band of extremist jihadists committed to the elimination of western civilization by all possible means. Instead, some people in Britain and elsewhere are blaming U.S. policy -- and Britain's support for the U.S. -- for the attack.

It is not necessary for everyone in Europe or the Muslim world to agree with all aspects of U.S. policy. Disagreements over security issues must not, however, shift responsibility for Islamist terrorism from its ideology of hate to specific U.S. policy decisions, past or present. Those who consider Islamist terrorism as a response to the "occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine," as British activist Tariq Ali claimed recently, must explain how terrorists attacking a night club in Bali, Indonesia can be described as fighting occupation.

A booklet by the Pakistani jihadist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure), believed to be linked to the recent London bombings, declares the U.S., Israel and India as existential enemies of Islam and lists eight reasons for global jihad. These include the restoration of Islamic sovereignty to all lands where Muslims were once ascendant, including Spain, "Bulgaria, Hungary, Cyprus, Sicily, Ethiopia, Russian Turkistan and Chinese Turkistan. . . Even parts of France reaching 90 kilometers outside Paris." Blaming the U.S. for the delusions of these admittedly small groups confers a degree of legitimacy on Islamist extremists and undermines moderate Muslim struggling for the soul of their faith.

Some of the post-July 7 rhetoric against the U.S. is based on factually incorrect assertions, such as claims that the current global jihadist movement was somehow created by the U.S. or that America created radical religious seminaries (madrassas) in the Muslim world. These arguments would only encourage the terrorist minority within the Muslim world, which does not want America or Europe to understand its nihilistic beliefs.

The deliberate ignorance of blame-the-U.S. commentators is pervasive. Left-wing activist Mr. Ali wrote in the Guardian the day after the London bombings that "the principal cause of this violence is the violence inflicted on the people of the Muslim world." He suggested, and other critics of the U.S. agree, that "it is safe to assume that the cause of these bombs is the unstinting support given by New Labor and its prime minister to the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq."

Reporting on the links of three of the four London bombers to a madrassa, a BBC reporter said: "Madrassas mushroomed in the 1980s funded by religious radicals in Saudi Arabia and the United States as training and arming centers for thousands of mujahedeen fighting soviet forces in Afghanistan."

The truth is that some Muslims have interpreted Islamic teachings to include hatred of nonbelievers and, especially since the decline of Muslim power, advocated unconventional warfare against the disproportionately more powerful West. In the 19th century, the first antimodernity jihadist group called Tehrik-e-Mujahedeen (Movement of Holy warriors) emerged in India and operated in the country's northwest frontier, including parts of present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan. This puritanical militant movement first fought the region's Sikh rulers and later targeted the British.

The movement's founder, Sayyid Ahmed of Bareili, who died in 1831, organized cells throughout India to supply the frontier movement with men and money. Calling themselves mujahedeen, the movement's followers interpreted the Islamic concept of jihad in its literal sense of "holy war." India's jihadists killed British officials and civilians with swords and knives and their campaign of terror lasted for several decades. That 19th century movement spawned the contemporary ideology of jihad and serves as the prototype for subsequent the subsequent jihad network of al Qaeda and its associated groups in the region.

Sayyid Ahmed of Bareili himself was influenced by the ideas of Muhammad ibn-Abdul Wahab, founder of the Wahabi movement in present-day Saudi Arabia. Islamic revivalist movements calling for a return to early Islamic purity and the re-establishment of Muslim political power were active through much of the Muslim world long before America's engagement with the greater Middle East. If the Islamists' ideology precedes U.S. involvement in the region by more than a century, how can Britain's support for U.S. security policy alone be the instigator of Islamist violence in London?

Similarly, U.S. support for the guerilla campaign against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan cannot be described as American endorsement of jihadist ideology. The Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan in an effort to bolster a weak client regime, which was fighting a mass resistance supported initially by Pakistan.

From the U.S. point of view, it made strategic sense to bleed the Soviets and force them out of Afghanistan. The U.S. channeled its support for the Afghan resistance through its ally, Pakistan, and encouraged another ally, Saudi Arabia, to support the Afghans as well. The Afghan resistance included secular nationalists as well as Islamist jihadists. It was the Saudis and Pakistan's military ruler General Ziaul Haq who decided to allow Islamists from all over the world to congregate in Pakistan to train for war across the border.

The decision to radicalize madrassas that had previously shunned Western values without fighting against them was also taken by the Saudis and Pakistan's rulers. Saudi Arabia sought to assert itself as the leader of the Sunni Islamic world in competition with Shia revolutionary Iran. Pakistan planned on using the jihadists as a tool for establishing a client regime in Afghanistan and to wrest disputed Kashmir from India.

Although Pakistani madrassas have been blamed for producing the bulk of global jihad foot soldiers, several recent studies point out that terrorists involved in attacks against Western targets are as likely to have been educated in ordinary schools as in madrassas. The ideology of hate in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and other Muslim countries is not limited to religious seminaries, though the madrassas have been making their own negative contribution.

The U.S. did not train, fund or equip the global jihadists during the Afghan war, nor did it directly fund the establishment of even a single madrassa. Approximately $2 billion in covert assistance was channeled to the mujahedeen through Pakistan's intelligence service. The U.S. erred in trusting its allies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, during the anti-Soviet Afghan war and failed to recognize their ideological or strategic agendas.

America's intelligence apparatus and intellectual community, focused on fighting communism, did not identify the potential of radical Islamists to emerge as a major global security threat. That error is now being rectified. To minimize the significance of the radical Islamists' ideology, and blame America for attacks against the west, is as likely to swell the ranks of terrorists as are real or perceived grievances within the Muslim world.

Mr. Haqqani, author of the Carnegie Endowment book "Pakistan Between Mosque and Military" (2005), teaches International Relations at Boston University. He has served as adviser to three Pakistani prime ministers and as Pakistan's ambassador to Sri Lanka.
0 Replies
 
ican711nm
 
  1  
Reply Mon 1 Aug, 2005 02:40 pm
Quote:
A booklet by the Pakistani jihadist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure), believed to be linked to the recent London bombings, declares the U.S., Israel and India as existential enemies of Islam and lists eight reasons for global jihad. These include the restoration of Islamic sovereignty to all lands where Muslims were once ascendant, including Spain, "Bulgaria, Hungary, Cyprus, Sicily, Ethiopia, Russian Turkistan and Chinese Turkistan. . . Even parts of France reaching 90 kilometers outside Paris." Blaming the U.S. for the delusions of these admittedly small groups confers a degree of legitimacy on Islamist extremists and undermines moderate Muslim struggling for the soul of their faith.
0 Replies
 
nimh
 
  1  
Reply Tue 2 Aug, 2005 04:59 am
Quote:
Polish PM: Iraq Nation-Building 'Failed'

By MATTIAS KAREN, Associated Press Writer
Mon Aug 1,11:06 PM ET

TALLBERG, Sweden - Poland's prime minister said Monday that postwar nation-building efforts in Iraq have "failed totally," but expressed hope that the country's different religious groups can work together to build an independent nation.

Prime Minister Marek Belka, whose country has been a close U.S. ally since the invasion of Iraq, said the United States and its allies made a mistake by basing its postwar plan for Iraq on the same model used for Germany after World War II.

"It failed totally," Belka said at a panel discussion on nation-building at an international forum in Sweden. "Many mistakes, major mistakes, have been committed."

Poland has commanded a multinational force in Iraq since September 2003, although the force's size has shrunk from 9,500 troops to 4,000. [..]
0 Replies
 
revel
 
  1  
Reply Tue 2 Aug, 2005 05:58 am
nimh, this will dismissed in ican's previous word for the month, "cannot's." However, I am glad that people are stepping up to say the facts and reality of the case.

Ican, the operative word there would be "believed."
0 Replies
 
Cycloptichorn
 
  1  
Reply Tue 2 Aug, 2005 08:41 am
Quote:
Haas has it exactly right!

Nothing the civilians being mass murdered, or the civilians who will be mass murdered, have done justifies their mass murder. Nothing!

It is terrifying that you actually think otherwise. It is even more terrifying that you and other people who think like you, because of such thinking might eventually evolve into malignancies yourselves.

Goodgodgerty!


Haas says they hate us because of 'who we are' but doesn't provide a shred of evidence to show how this is true. This is becuase it is not true.

The question of the article isn't 'are the terrorists justified,' though that is the way you have chosen to look at it. The question was 'why do they hate us?' There is ample evidence that our DIRECT actions have lead to much of this extremism, and you know it! There is little evidence that they 'hate freedom' and want to kill us all.

What are the major goals of OBL and AQ, Ican?

Reformation of Dar-Al Islaam.

What did your piece a few posts above say again?

Quote:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Quote:
A booklet by the Pakistani jihadist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure), believed to be linked to the recent London bombings, declares the U.S., Israel and India as existential enemies of Islam and lists eight reasons for global jihad. These include the restoration of Islamic sovereignty to all lands where Muslims were once ascendant, including Spain, "Bulgaria, Hungary, Cyprus, Sicily, Ethiopia, Russian Turkistan and Chinese Turkistan. . . Even parts of France reaching 90 kilometers outside Paris." Blaming the U.S. for the delusions of these admittedly small groups confers a degree of legitimacy on Islamist extremists and undermines moderate Muslim struggling for the soul of their faith.


That's not a delusion. That's Dar al-Islaam. Of course I don't think it's going to happen or that it's right; but your piece is reinforcing my statement that the terrorists have other goals than just to kill. They have other reasons than just hate.

You and Haas seek to simplify and demonize your enemies simultaneously. You speak about how they must be 'exterminated' and give them childish motivations. Ridiculous! You also seek to remove responsibility from the US for it's actions, which I find troubling at best and downright idiotic at worst. You are a smart guy; you know as well as I do that we have been messing around over there for a long time, and that we've lead to a lot of problems there in our search for Oil. All perfectly justified according to you, right? Not according to everyone.

Wake up! Underestimating the enemy will get you, and all of us, killed!

There is an argument made by the other side, one I would like to see you address:

The US, through it's economic support and direct military action, has killed many, many more civilians than Terrorists have killed. Many more. We say we're doing it in the name of 'good.' They disagree. They also say that since we ELECT our leaders, and they choose to go to war, and we don't kick them out, then our civilians are complicit in the deaths of innocents.

How is this argument flawed?

Cycloptichorn
0 Replies
 
Steve 41oo
 
  1  
Reply Tue 2 Aug, 2005 08:49 am
Regarding Haqqarnis piece

1. Saudi Arabia funded (to the tune of $4bn), the US supplied the surface to air stinger missiles, and Britain helped with training of radical islamists who were used to fight the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The next generation are fighting us.

2. The failed occupation of Iraq has provided those same islamists with an ideal training ground with plenty of live targets to perfect their urban guerrilla techniqes.

3. The source of muslim grievance is western meddling and interference in muslim countries over the last 100 years because of our dependency on middle eastern oil.
0 Replies
 
Setanta
 
  1  
Reply Tue 2 Aug, 2005 09:12 am
It ought not to be forgotten that when the caribinieri initially questioned Mehmet Ali Agca after his failed attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul, he said he was out to kill "the leader of the crusades." Many people have contended that the Soviets were behind the attempt. I doubt it for all of the good reasons i have so often advanced about conspiracy theories--but even were it so, it would only underline the ease with which greivance can be exploited.

Muslim or Christian, people are easily swayed by propaganda. Propaganda becomes more effective as it is more plausible. In 1100, the Muslim world was the height of enlightenment--in their own eyes, at least, and they were, in many respects, far more sophisticated than the unwashed hordes from Europe who soon attacked them. The anti-western propaganda of radical Islam starts with the crusades. There they find ample reason to portray us as animals--Frankish monks provide the evidence that Frankish crusaders commited an act of canibalism during the first crusade. It doesn't matter that the incident were not characteristic, propagandists don't deal in ultimate truths, they deal in plausible lies--and a little evidence goes a long way. Christian sources once again provide a wealth of evidence of rape and pillage, and the intentional murder of women and children. Once again, that this does not characterize all Christians is irrelevant to the propagandist's story.

Since that time, the Muslim world has declined in political power and wealth. When the steam turbine engine was developed, coal was an impractical source for firing the boilers, but it was soon realized that fuel oil would make those engines far superior to the reciprocating steam engines. Combined with screw propulsion, already perfected for warships during the American civil war, the range, speed and independence from land bases of naval vessels was increased dramatically. While Winston Churchill was First Lord and Jack Fisher was Sea Lord at the Admiralty, the decision was made to switch to oil-fired boilers operating steam turbine engines--HMS Dreadnought was the first "modern" battleship to include the new design. The desultory exploration for oil which had begun in Persian and Russian central Asia became very much more important, and geologists pointed to the Middle East as a likely candidate for petroleum reserves.

After the Great War, Arthur Balfour was charged with dividing the former Osmanli Empire into spheres of influence for France and England. Then an old man, he was seconded by Winston Churchill as a young, energetic man to help him get the job done. The original plan, which Balfour was willing to accept, left the Turkish province of Mosul in French hands. Churchill changed that pronto, and Mesopotamia (soon to be Iraq) was created, an ethnic and religious abortion throwing together the Kurds and Arabs, and the Sunnis and Shi'ites--and all so the Royal Navy could have its fuel oil.

Now we want the petroleum for other purposes, but we want it more now than ever we did before, and the United States has jumped in with both feet where the English once strolled, and got badly tripped up in Baghdad in the 1920's. I've pointed all of this out before in these threads, time and again. It appears that a few thousand American and English soldiers have had to die for it to even dawn on American conservatives that justified or not, our actions over a century have played right into the hands of Muslim rabble-rousers. These people look around themselves, see that they are poor and 99 out of a hundred of their neighbors are poor, and westerners are everywhere looking obsessively for petroleum. Throw some anti-Israeli propaganda into the mix, and you have a sure-fire line to sell to the "got nothing to lose" young men of the Muslim world. Sadly, many American conservatives still don't see, or won't admit it. We've made our bed, and the right is hollering about being obliged to lie in it.
0 Replies
 
 

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