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

To: Neocon who wrote (153601)	12/7/2004 5:35:09 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Arabs are not a big fraction of Muslims.

To: Neocon who wrote (153601)	12/7/2004 5:35:47 PM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Western Imperialism is not the key to whatever happened to the Arabs or Muslims. Of course not. Most Arab nations--a useful and necessary distinction not to say Muslim--have been in more or less continuous conflict with non-Arabs for a very, very long time, since Islam started. Conflict, mostly in the form of attempts to conquer, is a religious imperative. We are simply the latest, godless enemy, especially since we inadvertantly lit the fuse of the current fundamentalist revival. This revival is carrying a lot of non-Arabs with it. It is the failure to conquer and to otherwise prosper in a peaceful manner caused by a fixation on taking the lives and property ["lands" in the Muslim vernacular] of the conquered infidels which is the primary historical cause of Arab resentment. A later, much later cause, is the discovery of oil, which has been a complete disaster for Arabs for a lot of reasons. As Fareed Zakaria brilliantly states in The Future of Freedom, the discovery of vast amounts of natural resources is a curse.