Are we at war with Islam?

[The Reaper]

Originally Posted by Greenhat

Good reads.

Very focused on the middle-east and immediate surroundings.

Yet the majority of Islam is not in the middle-east.

It seems to me, that the issue is not Islam, it is the culture, norms, economic and social realities that exist primarily in the middle-east and the surrounding areas.

Islam is a tool that certain groups are using to manipulate followers, but they are able to use that tool because of the culture that they are in. The manipulation is far less successful in Islamic nations that do not share the characteristics of the middle-east (Malaysia, Indonesia, the various former Soviet states, Bahrain, etc.).

Just as the IRA used Catholicism as a tool to manipulate support in Ireland, Northern Ireland and the United States.

To my way of thinking, that means the key to long-term success against these terrorists is taking Islam away from them as a tool by encouraging cultural and social changes that are already accepted in Islamic nations. In other words, actively assist the nations of the middle-east in becoming more like the Islamic nations outside the middle-east.

In my opinion, the biggest single contributor to that sort of change? Is free-market trade, linked to democratically elected leadership.

GH:

I think you overplay the US role in the Troubles, but I am not from your part of the country. We have already lost more people in the GWOT than were killed in the entire IRA campaign.

Are you maintaining that the predominantly Islamic states from the former Soviet Union, former Yugoslavia, the Phillipines, and Indonesia are benevolent and non-violent?

A successful democracy requires a vibrant middle-class, a feature lacking in most of the Islamic states. The failure to acknowledge that was one of the many major failings of the Klinton regime. You can conduct democratic elections in Haiti and have all of the fre trade you want with them, but they are going to revert as soon as the adult leadership (with guns) departs. This is true in most of the Islamic states. I think that the best we can hope for in the short to mid-term is responsible, benevolent dictatorships. There MAY be sufficient middle-class people in Iraq to make it work. I do not think that it will in Afghanistan without a lot of support for a long time.

I am not sure that I want the Arab Moslems learning anything else from the Chechens.

IMHO, the money would be better spent helping moderate clerics and eliminating those teaching hate by any means possible, preferrably by discrediting and disenfranchising them and their followers.

TR