I should have said the former govt. of Iraq was secular and kept the Sunni and Shia religiosity under control.
Yeah, Saddam had everybody "under control". A brutal enough dictatorship can do that. But Saddam wasn't secular. He may have started out secular, but when he saw which way the wind was blowing in the Islamic world, he tried to catch the Islamist wave. During his last years, he a) put "Allahu Akhbar" onto the Iraqi flag b) had himself routinely shown praying and acting pious c) had a Koran written in his own blood d) declared himself Caliph, a religious title, and f) built 50 enourmous grandiose mosques all over Iraq.
Now, how secular is that, I ask you?
Isn't our relationship with SA a prime source of AQ hatred toward the US?
Seriously, would we even have a problem with AQ if it weren't for Israel and SA?
Yeah, sure we would. AQ's problem is that the "West" meaning American and Europe are the most powerful countries on the planet, when it should be the Arabs like Allah promised.
Now, you want to look at specific grievances, they got them, starting with the Crusades and the Requonquista and going forward from there. US soldiers on the holy soil of SA was a big one for AQ. Israel too, though that was a late addition for AQ.
Basically, they want to destroy the West (Israel too as an outpost of the West run by contemptible Jews) and restore the Caliphate - by which they mean some idealized version of the Caliphate of a 1000 years ago, not resembling in any way the actual history. What their philosophy really is when you look at is totalitarianism wrapped in the green flag of Islam. So it's a modern philosophy, since totalitarianism is a 20th century invention.
I've noticed that a starting assumption of people with a liberal bent is to assume that anybody who has grievances has rational grievances and can be negotiated with. But it's not always true, especially with totalitarian ideologies. |
