Hawk, it suddenly occurred to me that AlQ and Islamic Jihad are no threat to you and me. Relax, put away the Peacemakers, put the troops "at ease".
There was another bomb in Pakistan, killing about 45 Sunni people during a gathering to celebrate the Prophet's birth, peace be upon him and me. today.reuters.co.uk
The main reason there is terrorist murder isn't really because of Israel, the Great Satan taking oil, infidels at the gates, envy of our freedom, envy of our wealth, infidels in Moslem lands, cartoons in Denmark, burqa bans in French schools, immigration restrictions, or any of the other "reasons". It's because they want to kill somebody. They are angry people looking for a justification to attack somebody. There is always a reason for people who feel like that to murder somebody.
The most likely target is people who are handy and who are "bad".
As we learned from Christianity and all sorts of ideological groupings, the most hatred is expressed for those who take the wrong path, out of the approved group, away from the Big Boss Man alpha male. Look at the carnage that Protestants and Catholics inflicted on each other. Sunni and Shiite seem to be like Protestant and Catholic.
It's only during the Crusades that they might close ranks and jointly oppose the infidels. Maori tribes used to be at each other's throats in genocidal cannibalistic territorial warfare. The British came along, offering muskets to anyone who would trade muskets for land. One or other of the tribes would figure, "Hmmm, we don't need that land over there anyway, the British seem to think it's good, we can trade with them and maybe even eat them if we want to, get jobs and stuff and those muskets will be very handy for taking more land from the goddammed Tainui or Ngati Whatua anyway so we'll have a net profit, before tax". Of course, the other tribe would be thinking the same way. So both would be armed with muskets having traded with the British for land. It got very icky until the Treaty of Waitangi was agreed to stop the carnage and enable more sensible land purchases by the Crown. Which didn't totally stop Maori carnage - check out what they did to Moriori on the Chatham Islands.
Anyway, the USA could offer muskets in exchange for some of that spare oil than the Sunnis and Shiites have sitting in the ground. Maybe Saddam could be released and given some muskets in exchange for one of the oil fields. He would soon bring order. It turns out he didn't have WMDs or nefarious intent against the USA [as was obvious to unbiased observers]. He was mainly interested in stopping the local Goddammed Shiites from usurping him. The USA gave him some muskets to attack the Shiites in Iran, but he didn't make much progress there.
Religious people are often fanatical against heretics. Sunnis are heretics to Shiites. Shiites are to Sunnis. While they debate the relative merits of their dogma using bombs as tools to elucidate the finer theological points of their respective cases, they won't be hassling you on the other side of an ocean somewhere.
Plus ca change.
Mqurice |
