<If waging war on Islamo-Fascist militants equates to a "crusade", then so be it>
Americans, and only Americans, use the word "crusade" in its general non-religious meaning. Europeans and Muslims think of King Richard and Saladin, when they hear the word Crusade. Any American President knows his words are going to be in all the world's newspapers, and he is responsible for those words. Or he should.
Are we making war on a few "Baathists remnants" and "terrorist dead-enders", or on 1.2B people? With the constant references to "God is on the side of our army" by our President, and soldiers like Boykin, and Daniel Pipes, Rev. Robertson and Franklin Graham, it's not clear. And it needs to be very very clear, if we are going to have any chance of winning this war. It isn't that 1.2B people are going to get RPGs and go to Iraq (or New York) to kill Americans. All that is required for our defeat, is if most of the world's 1.2B Muslims decide not to cooperate with us. If 5% are willing to fight to the death against us, and 95% do nothing to help us, we lose.
On current evidence, not only have we alienated the opinion of 90% of those 1.2B Muslims, but we've also alienated a solid majority in France and Germany and Japan and S. Korea and China, with our leader's loose talk about crusades and preventive wars.
The Muslim world sees Israel as our proxy (or perhaps us as Israel's proxy). So, when Sharon's government builds another Jewish settlement on another hilltop around Jerusalem, Muslims see us doing exactly what the original Crusaders did, in exactly the same place. The crumbling walls of 12th Century Crusader forts, in sight of the new Wall. The fact that Bush turned out to be wholly insincere, about getting Israel to stop the settlement-building, is a huge PR victory for Bin Laden. It would have been better to make no promises, than to publish the Road Map, commit U.S. prestige to it, and then not hold Israel to any of it.
Fundamentalist Muslims see Western secularism, the Enlightenment, individualism, materialism, as anti-religious. They consider Islam to be an all-encompassing guide to life, politics, economics. To challenge that, is "to overthrow Islam as a religion". That's the way they see it. |
