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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group

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To: Hawkmoon who wrote (118582)	11/5/2003 5:33:14 AM
From: frankw1900	Read Replies (2) of 281500

Iraq was the best choice for initiating this cultural change and providing an ideological alternative to the militant Islamo-Fascists. And why some of these jokers can't understand that literally amazes me. They don't believe in modernity. They don't know it was gained and defended with blood - defended the last time only 60 years ago - or they think its primacy doesn't matter in a world that's becoming smaller. Some of them are so-called cultural relativists who, amazingly, think pre-modern societies are as good as modern ones. And they have this belief despite the fact that far more folk want to move from pre-modern places to modern ones than the reverse. Some who sort of believe in modernity think efforts like Iraq aren't necessary because the triumph of modernity is an assured thing and the pre-modern societies will eventually change over for the self evident benefits modernity has. Both very recent and older history are not reassuring in this regard. Modernity in the 20th century fought enormous wars against the archaic froms of naziism, fascism and communism. and it was a near thing. The Muslim society of millenia ago had its modernity destroyed by the very type of ideology peddled by today's islamists. The Chinese have a very long history of seeing their versions of modernity defeated repeatedly. The success of modernity is in ideas and it's vulnerable to archaic ideas. For all its success modernity is unsettling for its inhabitants and they often feel insecure, thus the Saudi financed missionary programs promoting archaic totalitarian ideology in Western countries are successful in moving good numbers of Muslim folk from the mainstream modern society and it's having far too much success in pre-modern places. The complacent members of modern societies will, in an effort to deny their vulnerability, and deny the necessity of taking the fight into the totalitarians' backyards as we are doing in Iraq, say the real enemy is al Qaida, and the Iraq venture is not necessary. They are wrong because we can kill any number of al Qaida types to no lasting effect unless the archaic, kleptocratic, totalitarian regimes, which don't give their citizens political headroom and are incubators of archaic terrorist ideologies, are re-formed or removed. These regimes have found it convenient to promote or tolerate the islamists. They aren't going to reform willingly. A credible threat to their existence and an alternative to the noxious ideologies must be put to them. This can't be done through inaction.

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