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

To: Katelew who wrote (223460)	3/9/2007 8:13:03 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

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.

To: Katelew who wrote (223460)	3/9/2007 8:29:32 PM
From: Sultan	Respond to of 281500

Totally Off Topic.. :o) In Canada... worldpartnershipwalk.com In USA.. partnershipwalk.org

To: Katelew who wrote (223460)	3/9/2007 9:07:18 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Let's say I agree with you about Wahabbi forces. Can this problem be dealt other than militarily? I would say that military force is necessary but not sufficient. When somebody wants to make his argument against you by blowing up your soldiers and civilians at home and abroad, you are going to have to give him convincing reasons why he should think twice about doing that. Diplomatic protests are not going to cut the mustard. But the real battle has to be within Islam, to discredit this kind of thinking. That's one reason I'm so hung up over the media war, and the way in which the leftist media has slipped into a de facto alliance with the Wahabbis and other Islamists. Some are just being used, others know what they are doing but don't care because anybody who hates George Bush so much is okay by them. And again, why are we consorting with the enemy? Why and how we "are consorting with the enemy" is a long story. The story of the US - Saudi alliance, that linchpin of the State Department's ME policy - is a long one. And you know, for once the US did not run around messing with other countries. We told the Saudis, just keep the oil flowing, we'll pay you plenty and leave you alone. Nice deal for them, right? And what did the Saudis do? They made a Faustian deal with the devil. About 30 years ago, just as the oil money began to flow in earnest, the kingdom was rocked by rebellion from the Wahabbis, who were very upset by Saudi governmental corruption, immorality and general deviation from 'pure' Islam. At the same time, Iran had been taken by Khomenei and it was attacking the House of Saud, sometimes with words, sometimes physically as in the takeover of the Grand Mosque in Meccah in 1979. So the Saudi Royals were plenty worried. Now being the Saudi Royals, their first thought was not, how do we fix this? but how do we buy these people off? The Saudi Royals alwasy fix their problems by buying people off. The deal they made was to give the most puritanical of the Wahabbis carte blanche to take over the Saudi educational system and build as many maddrassahs and mosques all around the world as they wanted. Worked fine for a while. No more revolution, the Wahabbis got busy. The Saudis also encouraged ardent Wahabbis to go off to fight in Afghanistan. But now the chickens are coming home to roost. A whole generation of young Saudis have been educated with those hateful Wahabbi textbooks instead of learning anything useful. And there are lots of young Saudis sinch rich Saudis are heroically polygamous, often going through a dozen wives (only 4 at a time, naturally). Osama bin Laden has over 50 siblings, for example. So all these young Saudis look at bin Laden and see a guy who really practices what he preaches, the same stuff that was preached to them. And meantime, AQ, having gotten the Russians out of Afghanistan, got the idea it could take on Saudi Arabia and the US. So if you ask why we are still dealing with House of Saud, it's only because anybody who replaced them would be worse.