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

[Sigi]

That was an outstanding article. Thanks for posting it, TR.

[Jimbo]

Originally Posted by Greenhat

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.

As a guy I once worked for used to put it:"Take the cause away from the guerrilla."

As for the part about encouraging nations in the middle east to become like the islamic countries outside of the middle east, that simply will not happen.

Originally Posted by The Reaper

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

No, but they are no more violent than their non-Islamic neighbors (in SE Asia, Cambodia, Vietnam and Burma are significantly more violent nations).

A successful democracy requires a vibrant middle-class, a feature lacking in most of the Islamic states.

I guess that depends on how you rate a successful democracy. The nation where I currently live has been a democracy for quite a while (sometimes more successfully than others). It has only developed a vibrant middle-class very recently. Both Japan and Korea were relatively successful democracies before they had any substantial middle-class.

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.

And when the terrorist leaders turn to another method of recruiting for their "cause" (which is power for themselves, no matter how they dress it up)?

It isn't that long ago that a number of Arab terrorist groups espoused Marxism. As someone has already pointed out, religion is easier to exploit and manipulate, but that doesn't mean that the culture can't be exploited by other means.

Originally Posted by Jimbo

As a guy I once worked for used to put it:"Take the cause away from the guerrilla."

As for the part about encouraging nations in the middle east to become like the islamic countries outside of the middle east, that simply will not happen.

"more like"

And I'll bet that 100 years ago, no one would have thought that Japan would have adopted so many bits from American culture... but they have...

[The Reaper]

Originally Posted by Greenhat

No, but they are no more violent than their non-Islamic neighbors (in SE Asia, Cambodia, Vietnam and Burma are significantly more violent nations).

I doubt that anywhere on Earth is more violent than Chechnya.

Originally Posted by Greenhat

I guess that depends on how you rate a successful democracy. The nation where I currently live has been a democracy for quite a while (sometimes more successfully than others). It has only developed a vibrant middle-class very recently. Both Japan and Korea were relatively successful democracies before they had any substantial middle-class.

Japan and Korea were not really democracies before US occupation. Even now, Japan is a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary government, not a strict democracy. BTW, Thailand is a constitutional monarchy as well.

Originally Posted by Greenhat

And when the terrorist leaders turn to another method of recruiting for their "cause" (which is power for themselves, no matter how they dress it up)?

It isn't that long ago that a number of Arab terrorist groups espoused Marxism. As someone has already pointed out, religion is easier to exploit and manipulate, but that doesn't mean that the culture can't be exploited by other means.

Any program to take the initiative and have them react to us would be a good one. We need to be inside their OODA Loop for a change. I would say that it is a lot easier to recruit martyrs for Islam than for Karl Marx and his ideology. What would he promise for the afterlife, a truly classless society? Who wants that crap?

TR

[Jimbo]

Originally Posted by Greenhat

And I'll bet that 100 years ago, no one would have thought that Japan would have adopted so many bits from American culture... but they have...

Well, we DID firebomb them and then nuke them twice.

Originally Posted by The Reaper

Japan and Korea were not really democracies before US occupation. Even now, Japan is a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary government, not a strict democracy. BTW, Thailand is a constitutional monarchy as well.

Britain is also a Constitutional Monarchy... and a democracy. Parliamentary systems are just as entitled to be called democracies as our Republic.

As far as I know, there is no "pure democracy" in place as the government of a nation-state. All of what we call democracies are representative democracies, whether parliamentary systems or republics.

Originally Posted by Jimbo

Well, we DID firebomb them and then nuke them twice.

Didn't do that to Thailand, Korea, Russia or Singapore... but I think the same comments would have been made 100 years ago about them (actually, in Thailand's case, I actually have a book written about 60 years ago that claims that the west will never influence Thai culture. Oops).

[Airbornelawyer]

Originally Posted by The Reaper

Japan and Korea were not really democracies before US occupation. Even now, Japan is a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary government, not a strict democracy. BTW, Thailand is a constitutional monarchy as well.

Of the nations in Freedom House's rankings which receive the highest rating as free countries, 15 out of 46 are constitutional monarchies - Australia, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Tuvalu and the UK.

Of those receiving the second-highest rating, 7 out of 15 are constitutional monarchies - Belize, Grenada, Japan, Monaco, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

Jamaica and Thailand receive lower ratings, but are still "free". Six constitutional monarchies are "partly free" - Malaysia, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Tonga. Two are "not free" - Bhutan and Cambodia.

If you define a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary government as not being strictly a democracy, then your definition of democracy is too narrow. All of these constitutional monarchies are representative democracies, and only in a few - Liechtenstein, Thailand, Nepal, Tonga, Bhutan and arguably Luxembourg - does the monarch have any real authority.

[Airbornelawyer]

Let me qualify one statement above: all are democracies in the sense of having elected governments, but in Bhutan, Cambodia, Nepal and Tonga the democratic institutions are still fairly weak. Tonga's elected parliament, for example, is dominated by nobles, and criticism of the king is generally not permitted.

Of course, by modern standards, the United States was not a democracy for at least the first century of its existence (voting was limited essentially to propertied white males, and the upper house of the legislature was appointed by state governors, not elected).

[magician]

Not to get into a discourse on political science here, and by no means do I wish to offend anyone, but strictly speaking, America is not really a genuine democracy, either.

In fact, I do not believe that there is a nation on earth that is truly a democracy, as defined in any basic political science text book. Those countries that are "free," to an extent, have democratic traditions and institutions. But all nations are mixtures, and all are different.

As for Thailand....I must say, it has been educational living here.

If you badmouth the king, or the institutions of the monarchy, you are literally liable to have the holy shit kicked out of you. You will go to jail. With bruises. The monarchy is off limits for critical discourse.

Like TR....and I hate to say it, I think that some form of benevolent dictatorship may end up emerging in Iraq, and countries like it. Such political structures inevitably generate internal opposition, and over time, internal stresses can lead either to political change, or to conflict. Healthy polities evolve versions of democracy and free enterprise, and I do believe that it is possible for these features to emerge over time in distressed states. Look at China. It is still ruled by a communist party. But change is occuring there, even there, in what is arguably the oldest and most traditional country on earth. The change is driven by free, or somewhat free, enterprise. And by the free flow of ideas (China tries to put the internet genie back into the bottle, but it is too late), and by the interaction of cultures.

But I think that it is idealistic of us, as Americans, to hope that we can successfully transplant democratic institutions and traditions to countries with no history of them. I know that many Iraqis that I met were nostalgic for certain features of the Saddam days. They missed having reliable electricty, cheap and plentiful benzine, clean water...and they all pointed out that there was no anarchy in the streets. If you drove like an idiot, went the wrong way on a one way street, you were liable to be shot. Everything flowed in patrimonial fashion from the state.

Now, as anyone knows who has been to Iraq since the fall of Saddam, driving there is worse than driving virtually anywhere else on the planet. In fact, much of the country is de facto chaos.

It is a toss up, in my mind, whether Iraq as a contiguous state will survive. My money is on a loose federation, with an increasingly autonomous Kurdish north, a Shia south increasingly aligned with Iran....and a middle area of Sunnis, living worse than the Palestinians in the Jordanian refugee camps or areas around Israel proper.

It is up to Iraqis, of course. If this transpires, then Iraqis will have no one to blame but themselves. America, and Americans, have given them the best chance that they could ever expect to start over, from scratch. If they choose to waste it, then there is not much that America or Americans can do about it.

For myself, I look forward to a day when I can return to Kurdistan. Wonderful people. Wonderful country. The rest of that country....I will refrain from expressing my opinions.

The alternative....if a cohesive, coherent Iraqi state is to survive...I believe that it will be because a form of benign dictatorship emerges. Dictatorship is what the Iraqi people know, and frankly, the average guy on the street just wants to make a living, and not be persecuted. They want to worship God in their own fashion, they want to be safe from mafias, safe from the secret police, and they want a viable standard of living.

It would be enough, in my mind, if some form of state were to emerge that enabled Sunni and Shia to live without conflict. I do not see this happening. I think that this schism within Islam has yet to be resolved, and it will play out over the coming decades. As infidel invaders, we merely distracted them from their primary focus, which was persecuting heretics.

The one thing that we accomplished, which more than any other fact mitigates in favor of Iraq (and this is one of the things of which we should be most proud), is the emergence of free enterprise. If we can help the state hold itself together, and simply hold off the insurgency long enough to help a viable middle class emerge...then something good might survive.

Again, I am not optimistic.

Magician,

Did you know that Iraq was a functioning democracy at one time?

[Pete]

Originally Posted by Greenhat

Magician,

Did you know that Iraq was a functioning democracy at one time?

Kinda' ended when the oposition party was taken out and shot.

The post WW I history of the middle east, the young turks, the rise of the Bath political party, how the Bath party machine was/is used, the rise of the "Strong Man" in each country all makes for some interesting background reading.

All of the above plays directly into how the military is run in those countries. Not for the same reasons, but similar, is how the African countries run their military forces. While there may be great small unit leaders, the higher command is picked for political reliability.

[magician]

Originally Posted by Greenhat

Magician,

Did you know that Iraq was a functioning democracy at one time?

Dimly, brother.

It might be helpful if someone wants to post a definition of "democracy" that we can all agree to use, if we pursue this thread further.