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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: frankw1900 who wrote (89292)	4/2/2003 5:42:13 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

Iraqi Suicide Bombing: Welcome to the Middle East by Elliot Chodoff Combatants masquerading as civilians; soldiers who open fire after they surrender; use of women and children as human shields for military installations under fire; providing young children with weapons and sending them into combat; shooting at friendly civilians and blaming the casualties on the enemy; using a car bomb disguised as a taxi to kill soldiers. Have the US and British forces made a wrong turn somewhere? If not, how did they end up in the West Bank and Gaza? Of course they didn't. They are simply getting an accelerated Iraqi lesson in what it means to try to fight a war in the Middle East. Over the past two and a half years as the IDF has battled terrorist organizations who have used and abused the local Palestinian population as a tool in their tactics while sending bombers into Israeli population centers to attack restaurants and buses, the US and others have had the luxury to judge Israel from a distance. Criticism abounded about IDF soldiers being too easy on the trigger, too harsh at roadblocks, too quick to detain suspects; too aggressive in eliminating terrorists. With the harsh reality of facing this type of warfare up close, the US has applied a somewhat different yardstick to the acceptable behavior of its own forces in these circumstances. As the New York Times reports, "the suicide bombing by a man in a taxi was followed minutes later by incidents in which three other taxis approached an Army checkpoint outside Najaf without stopping, prompting Bradley armored vehicles to open fire, destroying the taxis and killing an unknown number of Iraqis. In another incident reported by American journalists on Saturday, an Iraqi seized a woman as a shield near an American post, prompting a soldier to open fire, killing both the man and the woman." (NY Times, "Iraqi General Says 4,000 Volunteered for Suicide Attacks," March 31, 2003) A senior US commander was quoted today saying that if a car approaches a roadblock and doesn't stop, it will be fired on. All we can say under the circumstances is Welcome to the Middle East. The other side doesn't play this game by the same rules we do. The trick is to defeat him at his game while playing by our rules. Good luck. chodoff.blogspot.com

To: frankw1900 who wrote (89292)	4/2/2003 7:20:58 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Calm down. I stand by my original post. You along with many others on this thread, seem to be stuck in the early revolutionary Iran rhetoric. I suggest you start by looking before and after that time span to get a clearer picture. > Khomeini, bin Laden, the mullahs of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan say they are at militant war You may have not notices, but Khomeini died long ago. Pakistan is and has been for the longest time a most pro-US regime. Ditto for Saudi. So before you claim that fundamentalist Islam is not a backlash against too much US influence in those countries, you need to compare US influence vs. the popularity of Islamism in the Muslim world. > If you mean by 'popular" No I don't. So at this point I have to ignore the rest of your post. I thought I was clear. Islam is a complete belief system that they have and you don't. If they were to adopt liberalism, parliamentarism, feminism, whatever-else-ism, we (the 8000 ton gorilla of the world) would be able to find a way to manipulate the those movements and turn it our way. But we can't do that with fundamentalist Islam can we? It is something that is indigenous to them. We can't go bragging telling them what a Muslim should or should not do, can we? (well we can try <g>). Sun Tzu

To: frankw1900 who wrote (89292)	4/3/2003 1:32:03 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

>> True but there is no reason that they have to be at militant war with each other. > Where have you been? Khomeini, bin Laden, the mullahs of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan say they are at militant war against us and non Islamist muslims, and act on it, murdering folk throughout the world where ever they can get away with it. You would do well to read passages related to religion and politics from Paul's post Message 18792788 They go closely with what I've been saying. For your convenience, I am quoting the relevant passages: In the Western world, knowledge of history is poor -- and the awareness of history is frequently poorer. For example, people often argue today as if the kind of political order that prevails in Iraq is part of the immemorial Arab and Islamic tradition. This is totally untrue. The kind of regime represented by Saddam Hussein has no roots in either the Arab or Islamic past. Rather, it is an ideological importation from Europe... Religion had several advantages. It was more familiar. It was more readily intelligible. It could be understood immediately by Muslims. Nationalist and socialist slogans, by contrast, needed explanation. Religion was less impeded. What I mean is that even the most ruthless of dictatorships cannot totally suppress religiously defined opposition. In the mosques, people can meet and speak. In most fascist-style states, openly meeting and speaking are rigidly controlled and repressed. This is not possible in dealing with Islam. Islamic opposition movements can use a language familiar to all, and, through mosques, can tap into a network of communication and organization. This gave to religious arguments a very powerful advantage. In fact, dictatorships were even helping them by eliminating competing oppositions. They had another great advantage in competing with democratic movements. Such movements must allow freedom of expression, even to those who are opposed to them. Those who are opposed to them are under no such obligation. Indeed, their very doctrines require them to suppress what they see as impious and immoral ideas -- an unfair advantage in this political competition. These religious movements have another advantage. They can invoke the very traditional definition of "self" and "enemy" that exists in the Islamic world. It is very old. We see it, for example, in historiography. We can talk of European history as a struggle against, for example, the Moors, or the Tartars. If you look at contemporary historiography for the Middle East's Muslim peoples, their struggle is always defined in religious terms. For their historians, their side is Islam, their ruler is the lord of Islam, and the enemy is defined as infidels. That earlier classification has come back again. Osama bin Laden's habit of defining his enemies as "crusaders" illustrates this. By "crusaders," bin Laden does not mean Americans or Zionists. "Crusaders," of course, were Christian warriors in a holy war for Christendom, fighting to recover the holy places of Christendom, which had been lost to Muslim conquerors in the 7th century. Bin Laden sees it as a struggle between two rival religions. ... Modernization has not erased the fact that the peoples of the Muslim Middle East have a tradition of limited, responsible government. While not democratic, this tradition shares many features of democratic Western governments. It provides, I believe, a good basis for the development of democratic institutions -- as has happened elsewhere in the world. I remain cautiously optimistic for their future. In other words, there is no inherent reason why an Islamist regime must be at war with the West. All this clash of civilizations and "Rage and Pride" is ignorant of history and a sophisticated form of hate propaganda. Now I am done with this topic. Sun Tzu