Are we at war with Islam?

[tk27]

Originally Posted by Pinhead

Wouldn't surprise me. While I have no doubt they'd love to see the Caliphate restored an Islamic world order, I doubt they want to see it run by Persians. Kind of like how the Soviets didn't really want the world brought to the Chinese flavor of socialism, "fraternal socialist allies" notwithstanding.

Neither al-Assad in Syria, the Houses of Saud and Al-Sabah, Mubarak in Egypt , or any other government in the Middle East wants the return of the Caliphate. To do so would be to relinquish power; this is why all these governments have aided in the fight against AQ, albeit to different degrees. Yes, this includes Syria.
The greater objection from the region to Iranian control of the Caliphate would not be over ethnicity, but rather the fact that the region is predominantly Sunni while the Iranians are Shiite. This is why revolutionary Iran has largely abandoned its efforts to export its ideology to the Muslim world and focused on consolidating its influence with sectarian Shiite groups in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere in its neighborhood.
IMHO, I think the Sino-Soviet split was a result of competing national interests and think the analogy is not a good fit.

Originally Posted by gaijinsamurai

I remember in the 1980's it was fear of Iranian power which lead so many Arab governments to support Saddam Hussein.

It wasnt just the Arabs. I often forget how ugly Realpolitik can get.

Originally Posted by COLAW

And what US policies in the region would you agree they should be critical of?

If I were a Muslim living in an Arab country what US policy would I be critical of? How much time do you have?
Once you overcome mirror imaging it’s easier to answer that question.

[Slantwire]

Originally Posted by tk27

Neither al-Assad in Syria, the Houses of Saud and Al-Sabah, Mubarak in Egypt , or any other government in the Middle East wants the return of the Caliphate. To do so would be to relinquish power;

Very true; I think I may have spouted off too quickly. Certainly the existing regimes wouldn't want to yield power. It's the religious leaders who want a Caliph.

Both Shiite and Sunni want a Caliph, it's just that neither group wants him to be a member of the other group.

Originally Posted by tk27

IMHO, I think the Sino-Soviet split was a result of competing national interests and think the analogy is not a good fit.

Maybe not. I meant it in the sense that we tend to lump followers of Islam together the same way we lumped Communists together. The Sovs and ChiComs had their "fraternal socialist ally" public line while not seeing eye-to-eye; Shiite and Sunni both speak of Muslims vs the infidel while they blow each other up.

As for ethnic tension, maybe that's not a prime driver in the Arab - Iranian relationship, but it exists. Islamic Arabs are not blind to ethnicity. I think the janjaweed prove that pretty easily.

[gaijinsamurai]

Colawman, I didn't say Arab moderates SHOULD be critical of our policies, i wrote that their criticism is UNDERSTANDABLE. There is a difference.
For example, i can UNDERSTAND why Palestinians and other Arabs resent our close relationship to Israel. I can also UNDERSTAND why Saudi and Egyptian dissidents grow cynical when we talk about human rights in some dictatorial countries like Cuba and Iran, yet have such close relations with Mubarak and the Saudi Royal Family.
Did I make myself clear?

[CoLawman]

If I were a Muslim living in an Arab country what US policy would I be critical of? How much time do you have?
Once you overcome mirror imaging it’s easier to answer that question.

Trying to respond without hijacking the thread. So will start a new thread to share some of my thoughts and hopefully get your thoughts as well.

[The Reaper]

I found this to be an excellent analysis.

TR
*
History lesson
By Raymond S. Kraft, a California lawyer

Sixty-three years ago, Nazi Germany had overrun almost all of Europe and hammered England to the verge of bankruptcy and defeat, and had sunk more than four hundred British ships in their convoys between England and America for food and war materials.

The US was in an isolationist, pacifist, mood, and most Americans and Congress wanted nothing to do with the European war, or the Asian war.

Then along came Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and in outrage Congress unanimously declared war on Japan, and the following day on Germany, which had not attacked us. It was a dicey thing. We had few allies.

France was not an ally, the Vichy government of France aligned with its German occupiers. Germany was not an ally, it was an enemy, and Hitler intended to set up a Thousand Year Reich in Europe. Japan was not an ally, it was intent on owning and controlling all of Asia. Japan and Germany had long-term ideas of invading Canada and Mexico, and then the United States over the north and south borders, after they had settled control of Asia and Europe.

America's allies then were England, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and Russia, and that was about it.

All of Europe, from Norway to Italy, except Russia in the east, was already under the Nazi heel.

America was not prepared for war.* America had stood down most of it's military after WWI and throughout the depression, at the outbreak of WWII, there were army units training with broomsticks over their shoulders because they didn't have guns, and cars with "tank" painted on the doors because they didn't have tanks.* And a big chunk of our Navy had just been sunk and damaged at Pearl Harbor.

Britain had already gone bankrupt, saved only by the donation of $600 million in gold bullion in the Bank of England that was the property of Belgium and was given by Belgium to England to carry on the war when Belgium was overrun by Hitler.* Actually, Belgium surrendered in one day, because it was unable to oppose the German invasion, and the Germans bombed ! Brussels into rubble the next day anyway just to prove they could.* Britain has been holding out for two years already in the face of staggering shipping losses and the near decimation of its air force in the Battle of Britain, and was saved from being overrun by Germany only because Hitler made the mistake of thinking the Brits were a relatively minor threat that could be dealt with later and turning his attention to Russia, at a time when England was on the verge of collapse in the late summer of 1940.

Russia saved America's butt by putting up a desperate fight for two years until the US got geared up to begin hammering away at Germany. Russia lost something like 24 million people in the sieges of Stalingrad and Moscow, 90% of them from cold and starvation, mostly civilians, but more than a million soldiers.* More than a million.

Had Russia surrendered, then, Hitler would have been able to focus his entire campaign against the Brits, then America, and the Nazis would have won the war.

I say this to illustrate that turning points in history are often dicey things.* And we are at another one.

There is a very dangerous minority in Islam that either has, or wants and may soon have, the ability to deliver small nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, almost anywhere in the world, unless they are prevented from doing so.

The Jihadis, the militant Muslims, are basically Nazis in Kaffiyahs.* They believe that Islam, a radically conservative (definitely not liberal!) form of Wahhabi Islam, should own and control the Middle East first, then Europe, then the world, and that all who do not bow to Allah should be killed, enslaved, or subjugated.* They want to finish the Holocaust, -destroy Israel, -purge the world of Jews.* This is what they say.

There is also a civil war raging in the Middle East, for the most part not a hot war, but a war of ideas.* Islam is having its Inquisition and its Reformation today, but it is not yet known which will win - the Inquisition or the Reformation.

If the Inquisition wins, then the Wahhabis, the Jihads, will control the Middle East, and the OPEC oil, and the US, European, and Asian economies, the techno industrial economies, will be at the mercy of OPEC, not an OPEC dominated by the well educated and rational Saudis of today, but an OPEC dominated by the Jihadis.

You want gas in your car? You want heating oil next winter? You want jobs? You want the dollar to be worth anything? You better hope the Jihad, the Muslim Inquisition, loses, and the Islamic Reformation wins.

If the Reformation movement wins, that is, the moderate Muslims who believe that Islam can respect and tolerate other religions, and live in peace with the rest of the world, and move out of the 10th century and into the 21st, then the troubles in the Middle East will eventually fade away, and a moderate and prosperous Middle East will emerge.

We have to help the Reformation win, and to do that we have to fight the Inquisition, i.e., the Wahhabi movement, the Jihad, Al Qaeda, the Islamic terrorist movements.* We have to do it somewhere. We cannot do it nowhere.* And we cannot do it everywhere at once.* We have created a focal point for the battle now at the time and place of our choosing, in Iraq.

Not in New York, not in London, or Paris, or Berlin, but in Iraq, where we did and are doing two very important things.

(1) We deposed Saddam Hussein.* Whether Saddam Hussein was directly involved in 9/11 or not, it is undisputed that Saddam has been actively supporting the terrorist movement for decades.* Saddam is a terrorist. Saddam is, or was, a weapon of mass destruction, who is responsible for the deaths of probably more than a million Iraqis and two million Iranians.

(2) We created a battle, a confrontation, a flash point, with Islamic terrorism in Iraq.* We have focused the battle.* We are killing bad guys there and the ones we get there we won't have to get here, or anywhere else We also have a good shot at creating a democratic, peaceful Iraq, which will be a catalyst for democratic change in the rest of the Middle East, and an outpost for a stabilizing American military presence in the Middle East for as long as it is needed.

World War II, the war with the German and Japanese Nazis, really began with a "whimper" in 1928.* It did not begin with Pearl Harbor.* It began with the Japanese invasion of China.* It was a war for fourteen years before America joined it.* It officially ended in 1945 - a 17 year war - and was followed by another decade of US occupation in Germany and Japan to get those countries reconstructed and running on their own again ... a 27 year war.

World War II cost the United States an amount equal to approximately a full year's GDP - adjusted for inflation, equal to about $12 trillion dollars, WWII cost America more than 400,000 killed in action, and nearly 100,000 still missing in action.

The Iraq war has, so far, cost the US about $160 billion (U.S. GDP in 2006 = 13.04 trillion dollars, which means that the IRAQ war has cost the U.S. approximately 12.5% of a full years GDP), which is roughly what 9/11 cost New York.* It has also cost about 2,200 American lives, which is roughly 2/3 of the 3,000 lives that the Jihad snuffed on 9/11. But the cost of not fighting and winning WWII would have been unimaginably greater - a world now dominated by German and Japanese Nazism.

Americans have a short attention span, now, conditioned I suppose by 60 minute TV shows and 2 hour movies in which everything comes out okay. The real world is not like that.* It is messy, uncertain, and sometimes bloody and ugly.* Always has been, and probably always will be.

The bottom line here is that we will have to deal with Islamic terrorism until we defeat it, whenever that is.* It will not go away on its own.* It will not go away if we ignore it.

If the US can create a reasonably democratic and stable Iraq, then we have an "England" in the Middle East, a platform, from which we can work to help modernize and moderate the Middle East.* The history of the world is the clash between the forces of relative civility and civilization, and the barbarians clamoring at the gates. The Iraq war is merely another battle in this ancient and never ending war.* And now, for the first time ever, the barbarians are about to get nuclear weapons. Unless we prevent them.* Or somebody does.

[The Reaper]

We have four options.

• 1. We can defeat the Jihad now, before it gets nuclear weapons.
• 2. We can fight the Jihad later, after it gets nuclear weapons (which may be as early as next year, if Iran's progress on nuclear weapons is what Iran claims it is).
• 3. We can surrender to the Jihad and accept its dominance in the Middle East, now, in Europe in the next few years or decades, and ultimately in America.
• 4. Or we can stand down now, and pick up the fight later when the Jihad is more widespread and better armed, perhaps after the Jihad has dominated France and Germany and maybe most of the rest of Europe. It will be more dangerous, more expensive, and much bloodier then.

We can be defeatist peace activists as anti war types seem to be, and concede, surrender, to the Jihad, or we can do whatever it takes to win this war against them.

The history of the world is the history of civilizational clashes, cultural clashes.* All wars are about ideas, ideas about what society and civilization should be like, and the most determined always, win.

Those who are willing to be the most ruthless always win.* The pacifists always lose, because the anti pacifists kill them.

In the 20th century, it was Western democracy vs. communism, and before that Western democracy vs. Nazism, and before that Western democracy vs. German Imperialism.* Western democracy won, three times, but it wasn't cheap, fun, nice, easy, or quick. Indeed, the wars against German Imperialism (WWI), Nazi Imperialism (WWII), and communist imperialism (the 40 year Cold War that included the Vietnam Battle, commonly called the Vietnam War, but itself a major battle in a larger war) covered almost the entire century.

The first major war of the 21st Century is the war between Western Judeo Christian Civilization and Wahhabi Islam.* It may last a few more years, or most of this century.* It will last until the Wahhabi branch of Islam fades away, or gives up its ambitions for regional and global dominance and Jihad, or until Western Civilization gives into the Jihad.

It will take time.* It will not go with no hitches.* This is not TV.

The Cold War lasted from about 1947 at least until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.* Forty two years.* Europe spent the first half of the 19th century fighting Napoleon, and from 1870 to 1945 fighting Germany.

World War II began in 1928, lasted 17 years, plus a ten year occupation, and the US still has troops in Germany and Japan.* WWII resulted in the death of more than 50 million people, maybe more than 100 million people, depending on which estimates you accept.

The US has taken a little more than 2,500 KIA in Iraq.* The US took more than 4,000 killed in action on the morning of June 6th, 1944, the first day of the Normandy Invasion to rid Europe of Nazi Imperialism.* In WWII the US averaged 2,000 KIA a week for four years.* Most of the individual battles of WWII lost more Americans than the entire Iraq war has done so far.

But the stakes are at least as high . . . a world dominated by representative governments with civil rights, human rights, and personal freedoms . or a world dominated by a radical Islamic Wahhabi movement, by the Jihad, under the Mullahs and the Sharia (Islamic law).

I do not understand why the American Left does not grasp this. They favor human rights, civil rights, liberty and freedom, but evidently not for Iraqis. In America, absolutely, but nowhere else.

300,000 Iraqi bodies in mass graves in Iraq are not our problem? The US population is about twelve times that of Iraq, so let's multiply 300,000 by twelve. What would you think if there were 3,600,000 American bodies in mass graves in America because of George Bush? Would you hope for another country to help liberate America?

"Peace Activists" always seem to demonstrate where it's safe, in America.

Why don't we see Peace Activist demonstrating in Iran, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, North Korea, in the places in the world that really need peace activism the most? The liberal mentality is supposed to favor human rights, civil rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc., but if the Jihad wins, wherever the Jihad wins, it is the end of civil rights, human rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc. Americans who oppose the liberation of Iraq are coming down on the side of their own worst enemy.

If the Jihad wins, it is the death of Liberalism. Everywhere the Jihad wins, it is the death of Liberalism.

Raymond S. Kraft is a writer and lawyer living in Northern California.

[NousDefionsDoc]

I like it. I shall spread the word (I'm stealing it...)

[Gypsy]

That is an outstanding piece, thanks TR. I shall be sharing it as well.

[funnyman]

I live in the North East. Most of my friends (the civilians) are left-wing nuts. Most of my Army buddies and myself are either Republican, Independent or Constitutionalists. At lunch one day, a good friend's wife told me in an angry outburst, "we (America) should just mind our own business" with respect to Iraq. She and the other lefty friends of mine (who I don't really seem to hang around with anymore..) are all highly educated and successful. They drive to work in their SUVs or BMWs, get a Starbucks, and work behind a desk all day. Not that there's anything wrong with that because I do that too. The difference is that they're blinded by their self-imposed social eliteness. They can't imagine that there are people who *don't* drink lattes and surf the web all day. They imagine a perfect world where there is no evil, no starvation, no war, no genocide. They argue that the war in Iraq is about oil, but they don't stop for a second to think about how their lives would be changed without that oil - or with oil at 3X the current price. They say that the GWOT is creating terrorists, without conceeding that terrorists hated us before we invaded Iraq. They actually think we deserved 911, yet they continue the daily activities that supposedly justified 911. They don't believe that all over the world, (insert politically correct term dejour for nut-job Islamics) are engaged in a full-time job of planning our deaths. These Americans are exactly the isolationist/pacifists that the previous post mentioned. They're idealists. Their idealism needs to be tempered by realism. So what will take our present-day pacifists to wake up as they did for WWII? Maybe if Al-Qaida nukes the local Starbucks .

When they say we shoudn't have gone into Iraq because it's not part of the GWOT, I ask them this: what would you do if your neighbor told you they wanted to kill you and your family. You saw that neighbor unloading AK-47s from a U-Haul truck. Would you call the police, or just say "oh well, it's his right to hate me. I'm sure I must've done something to offend him. If he kills my family we deserve it" and watch as your family is mauled? The conversation always ends there. I say kill the enemy in HIS house, before he breaks into mine.

Part of the problem with the isolationist/pacifists here is that the US has become a society that's afraid to stand up for what's right. When I was young, if I swore in public, any nearby adult would chastize me. Today, every teen walks around dropping F-bombs and no one says a thing. We're afraid to spank our misbehaving children for fear of being sued by the ACLU. We let burglers sue owners because the burgler got hurt breaking into the owner's home. We've become so politically correct that we're afraid to take sides on the smallest issues for fear of being labeled a racist or intolerant. As a society, we've got to get back some moral fiber if we don't want this great country of ours to end up in the shitter.

For what I believe are biblical reasons, there is evil in this world. And it needs to be put to rest. There's lots of it, so it's good we got started.

Just my $.02
-FM

[CoLawman]

Count me in on forwarding TR's post. Thanks TR.

[smp52]

I was surfing the web for some articles and came across this one.

Based upon the source publishing it, I would take things with grains of salt. However, it is a long and interesting take on the history of Islam focusing on the Sufi movement's evolution and conflict within Islam itself. No bibliography provided to see all the source material.

I have found some inconsistencies in the article like the following:

Khwaja Muinuddin Chishti (1142-1236), founder of the Chishti Order, was a Persian from Khorasan, but settled among the Hindus of Rajasthan. His followers adopted the saffron color of the robes of the Hindu sages for their own coarse robes, and generally interchanged ideas and rituals with and even adopted the habits of the Hindu sadhus (mendicants). Like the sages of the Upanishads, he preached under a tree. He consciously spurned Delhi, seat of the Moghul court, for provincial Rajasthan.

Delhi was under the rule of Muslim Sultans, however, the Mughals (Moghals) hadn't entered the picture in the years Chishti lived. It was the Slave dynasty started by Qutubudin Aybak that ruled in his later years.

Since it is a long article, fact checking it would take quite a bit of time. But the central theme of conflict within Islam and its different branches evolving through history (Fall of the Caliphate, Turk, Persian, Mughal rule, Colonialism, and modern day middle eastern socialist regime and fundamentalist regimes) is interesting.

[BMT (RIP)]

http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...src=rss&rpc=22

Another convert to our way of thinking.

BMT

[tk27]

Say we are at war with Islam. If AQ bombs the Sears Tower today, where do we bomb tomorrow?

We lump AQ, Iran, Iraq, the Israeli – Palestinian issue, Hezbollah, balance of power politics, and personal, tribal & sectarian violence altogether at our own peril. True, Islam is the thread that runs through the lot. But focusing only on that factor is just as naïve and detached from reality as isolationist-pacifism.

Originally Posted by Raymond S. Kraft, a California lawyer

Americans have a short attention span, now, conditioned I suppose by 60 minute TV shows and 2 hour movies in which everything comes out okay. The real world is not like that.* It is messy, uncertain, and sometimes bloody and ugly.* Always has been, and probably always will be.

At least I found one thing I agree with in his essay.
If he truly believes this why is his analysis so theologically apocalyptic?

Originally Posted by funnyman

They're idealists. Their idealism needs to be tempered by realism.

Please do not bastardize the term realism. Neo-conservatism is not realism. Current President Bush is of a completely different international relations school of thought from his father President George H.W. Bush, an actual realist.

Originally Posted by funnyman

When they say we shoudn't have gone into Iraq because it's not part of the GWOT, I ask them this: what would you do if your neighbor told you they wanted to kill you and your family. You saw that neighbor unloading AK-47s from a U-Haul truck...

Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, Richards J. Heuer, Jr. Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 1999.
Chapter 11: Biases in Perception of Cause and Effect, subsection Overestimating Our Own Importance:
" In analyzing the reasons why others act the way they do, it is common to ask, "What goals are the person or government pursuing?" But goals are generally inferred from the effects of behavior, and the effects that are best known and often seem most important are the effects upon ourselves. Thus actions that hurt us are commonly interpreted as intentional expressions of hostility directed at ourselves. Of course, this will often be an accurate interpretation, but people sometimes fail to recognize that actions that seem directed at them are actually the unintended consequence of decisions made for other reasons. "

Originally Posted by funnyman

Part of the problem with the isolationist/pacifists here is that the US has become a society that's afraid to stand up for what's right....moral decline...

Hogwash.
I share a considerable amount of social conservatism with you, but to directly link a perceived moral decline in our society to problems with radical Islamists is bull. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson days after 9/11 said that civil liberties groups, feminists and pro-abortion groups bear partial responsibility b/c they turned God’s anger against America. This bull is just a lite version of what the oxygen-stealing Phelps family (the jackals that protest soldier’s funerals because gays are getting married) spew.

Our country and Western Civilization itself would shake hands with the Devil himself if he could meet our demand at a cost below $25 a barrel.

It would be easy to interpret my cynicism as a lack of will or resolve, it is not. IMHO our country neither knows itself or its enemy and I think our current public discourse proves that, and this needs to be overcome for our own survival.

[CoLawman]

[

QUOTE=tk27]Say we are at war with Islam. If AQ bombs the Sears Tower today, where do we bomb tomorrow?

I would say that we have done considerably more than bomb in retaliation for 9/11. To suggest we would have to .........bomb tomorrow in retaliation ignores the fact we are fully engaged in a war against those that would bomb the Sears Towers. Thus we stay the course (with renewed bipartisan support) if such a thing were to occur. All that goes out the window if a Sears attack was linked to Iran of course..........then you know where we bomb tomorrow!

We lump AQ, Iran, Iraq, the Israeli – Palestinian issue, Hezbollah, balance of power politics, and personal, tribal & sectarian violence altogether at our own peril. True, Islam is the thread that runs through the lot. But focusing only on that factor is just as naïve and detached from reality as isolationist-pacifism.

The common thread you mention is exactly where we need to focus. We are at war with the Islamo Fascists or whatever you want to call the Muslims who have declared war on us. We need to focus on the root cause. Trying to explain away the menace of Islam is exactly why we are engaged in a global war NOW!

There is no detachment from reality. We are at war with a religion, not a country. Evidence of this fact is the report that the current plot by homegrown Muslims in Britain preparing to blow up airlines full of passengers.

Lose focus on the Islamic factor and you do so at your own peril

At least I found one thing I agree with in his essay.

To be continued...........

[CoLawman]

Tk,
Mr. Kraft's article IMO cuts through the BS. The central theme being we destroy them! You cannot negotiate or rehabilitate these terrorists. You must kill them.

What is occurring in Israel right now is brought about by those (Olmert, Rice, and perhaps POTUS) who lose focus. They begin to look at the big picture, not unlike yourself, and fail to see the forest for the trees. This in no way is meant to be an insult to you.

If Israel stops now Hezbollah wins. Nasrallah wins as does Iran and Syria. If the cease fire occurs before Hezbollah and Nasrallah are destroyed then we (the western world) will suffer the consequences.

Those who concentrate on the big picture rather than focus on the cause are often students of history...........in rote only. They can recite it but they never learn from it.

When Hezbollah killed our Marines we failed to focus on the cause. When Buckley was kidnapped and killed we failed to focus. When our embassy in Iran was invaded we lost focus. The menace grows while our articulate and analytical civilian leaders continue to examine the big picture.

We must fight them now and destroy them now. I was much fonder of POTUS when he talked the talk and told the sponsors of terrorism that they would suffer the same fate as the terrorists. I fear that too many talented and bright individuals, similar to yourself, have caused him to lose that focus that you believe will result in our demise.

There are those times when someone needs their ass kicked.