I am beginning to understand the gravity of our situation in the
Middle East. I thought learning more would alleviate my fears, but it
has only made them more complicated. I fear that the Western world is
not willing to accept or even attempt to understand Islamic law as it
applies to the states function.
Even more important is the basic Islamic belief that the word of God
as they understand it, is supreme to the way in which Christians and
Jews understand it. It seems that certain fundamentalists have taken
to the idea that all of God's children must accept the Muslim faith in
order for the world to operate justly. And while the religion itself
falls short of labeling Christians and Jews as infidels, preferring to
recognize these people as "of the book", equality is definitely not
granted.
The mediator within me seeks to find some sort of compromise where in
which peace and self governance can be extended to these inherently
good people. I feel great anger when others accuse those of Islamic
faith to be evil, because violence is not mentioned once in the five
pillars of Islam. We must, however, accept that bad people will use
the word of God to propagate their ideas and it would be ignorant to
say the Muslims are the first and only group to do this. Christians,
Jews, secularists have all done things in the name of their beliefs
that are not necessarily virtuous but they felt justified in their
actions nonetheless.
I am baffled by those that also feel that democracy cannot be applied
to this eastern faith, when in fact this faith possesses the largest
body of established law that is at times more democratic than our own
in the great USA. However, I'm not certain that forcing democracy on
these countries is necessarily the best solution to the problem as we
perceive it. The removal of Saddam Hussein - WMDs or not - isn't
something that I would encourage but it is something that I can
accept. He violated and abused the human rights of his own people,
refused to comply with the United Nations, and outrightly harbored
terrorists, and at times promoted and financed their activities.
People act as if ousting Saddam was unusual even though this is
certainly not the first time the US has organized the removal of a
head of state to advance western objectives. This time, it was much
more overt. This time WMDs were the excuse, before it was Communism.
Both are arguably legitimate fears.
2 comments:
>> This time WMDs were the excuse
They weren't the excuse, they were the reason. And both Clinton and Kerry stoutly maintained that the WMDs were a threat. See:
http://www.glennbeck.com/news/01302004.shtml
Saddam the Psychopath put his people through hell, first because of the sanctions he brought on, and then because of the war that happened (Saddam didn't believe anybody would have the sack to come and get him) all because Saddam wanted to jerk the whole world around over whether he had WMDs, and because Saddam wanted to play the king-bully-boy to the "Arab street". Old Chinese saying: After someone in darkness shoots pistol at man with rifle, do not taunt man with rifle that in bag you have pistol.
I close with a quote from the Oct. 18, 2004 issue of TIME magazine, hardly considered a Gingrichite publication:
"Saddam had no clear picture of the U.S. He told his debriefer he tried to understand Western culture by watching U.S. movies and listening to Voice of America broadcasts. He loved Ernest Hemingway's novel The Old Man and the Sea because he read in the tale of the brave but failed fisherman a parallel to his own struggles.
"Even a hollow victory was by his reckoning a real one," the report says. Far more worried about Iran, Saddam did not consider the U.S. a "natural adversary" and throughout the '90s, he had his officials make overtures for a dialogue with the U.S. He said he was disappointed that Washington never gave him a chance. In the end, Saddam's failure to figure out the U.S. cost him everything. He never got the profound impact of 9/11 on U.S. attitudes and stupidly overruled advisers' suggestion that he issue a message of condolence for the carnage. Well into 2002, he never thought the U.S. could stomach the casualties of an invasion to depose him, and then "thought the war would last a few days and it would be over." Said Aziz: "He was overconfident. He was clever. But his calculations were poor."
The greatest mystery, though, was his long game of deception: if Saddam had destroyed his WMD to escape from sanctions, why did he work so hard from 1991 until he was overthrown in 2003 to perpetuate the belief he still had them? The reason, suggests Duelfer, lay in how he saw the "survival of himself, his regime and his legacy."
While the U.S. was fixated on Saddam's threat, he focused on his strategies for Iran and considered WMD essential to keeping his neighbor in check. So he was driven by what the report calls "a difficult balancing act": getting rid of his WMD to win relief from the sanctions while pretending he still had them to serve as a strategic deterrent. "The regime never resolved the contradiction inherent in this approach," says the report. Saddam privately told an aide the "better part of war was deceiving," but ironically he was telling the West the truth. In the end, his big bluff destroyed him—and drew the U.S. into an engagement that will help determine George W. Bush's fate at the polls next month. [An election George W. Bush won, if I recall correctly.]"
Full text at many places, including:
http://forums.3dgamers.com/archive/index.php/t-2788
Thank you so very much, the official (yet very mysterious) eternal fountain of knowledge.
If I didn't have so much respect for privacy and anonymity I might ask you, "who are you...really??". But I don't expect questions like that to be answered.
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