Murder Most Islamic
John on December 27, 2007 at 10:24 am
Al Qaeda is taking credit for the murder of former Pakistani Prime Minister Bhutto, though their involvement hasn’t been confirmed yet. Bryan at Hot Air has a complete run down.
The symbolism of Al Qaeda making multiple suicide attempts, killing hundreds of people in the processs, all to get to a woman who might stand up to them is terribly apt of course. They’d have gone after a man too, I suppose, but you can be sure they enjoyed this a little more. Background on Bhutto’s less than perfect history here.
Add this to my list of times when I hate Islam. It’s an ever-expanding list.
Category: Islamic Jihad |
True enough. Just remember that Islam isn’t a person it’s a religion, a nasty one in my opinion.
Love Islamic people, definitely. But I don’t think Jesus would invite us to love Islam, the jihadist version of which is practically a mirror image of Christianity.
December 28, 2007 @ 9:15 amMy thoughts exactly John. Hate the sin, not the sinner.
December 28, 2007 @ 11:45 amExcept that you don’t love Islamic people, since you support the continuing terrorizing, impoverishing and killing millions of Iraqi Muslims (and Christians) without any justifiable reason.
Claiming you love someone and actually loving them are two completely different things, as Jesus showed in his parable of the Good Samaritan.
May God have mercy on war mongers such as yourself.
Disclaimer: I too supported the invasions, but I have repented of my error and asked God for forgiveness.
December 29, 2007 @ 8:12 amSo this is not to judge you, but to (hopefully) bring you on the right track of loving your neighbor as yourself, as Jesus taught us.
Jeiel,
“…terrorizing, impoverishing and killing millions of Iraqui Muslims (and Christians)”? Where do you get the “millions” from, a reputable source or from some far left website? Perhaps you need to actually try and read other materials than those put out by the far left.
Everything has NOT been done perfectly and/or well for sure; but come on, that kind of hyperbole only demonstrates your ignorance.
December 29, 2007 @ 11:27 amUnfortunately, by calling me/us war mongers, and stating that I/we do not “love Islamic” people, you are judging. Saying you are not, contradicts everything else you are writing. You have no right to judge me, or anyone else, so be careful. I do love Islamic people, I love them no different than anyone else. All people are God’s creation, a reflection of His magnificent image. Our choices while here on earth do not always reflect His beauty, but again – those choices are to be condemned, not the people acting them out.
Be careful what you say, and where you point your finger.
December 29, 2007 @ 11:34 amMost of the civilians who’ve been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan were killed by Islamic militants, not US or coalition soldiers. The numbers are debatable but no one says millions.
If you think handing entire nations over to these same violent militias and allowing actual millions of people to die while we look the other way (exactly as happened when we bugged out of Vietnam) is the route to a clear conscience…
Ask yourself, what if the good Samaritan had come along as the man was being robbed and beaten and not afterwards? Should he wait patiently until the thugs have beaten the man nearly to death and then offer help to the man and forgiveness to the thugs?
Perhaps that’s your answer, but it’s not what I would do.
December 29, 2007 @ 11:47 amVery good points, John. No one really talks about the slaughters in Vietnam or Cambodia after the Democrats pulled us out and stopped funding the South Vietnamese.
Unfortunately, I think that the democracy project hasn’t panned out like we would have liked. We had Hezbo win in Lebannon (because most of the Christians fled), Hamas in Gaza and Islamic Jihad gained ground in Egypt when elections were held. I hope Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan will be different, but who knows?
December 29, 2007 @ 10:25 pmI don’t understand why anyone thinks democracy can work in Islamic nations. Islam is not just a religion, it is a political and social system, also. And it is not conducive to “goverment of the people, by the people, for the people” (Did I get that right?). It is very much a top-down, hierarchal system. The word “Islam” itself means submission. IMHO, the problem of Islam is insoluble (and, frankly, not ours to solve). God is in control – all of this is prophesied. I don’t mean we should roll over and play dead for the Jihadists – we have to fight them, but we should do so realistically, understanding that even moderate Muslim nations will never accept our type of government. The best we can do is witness, witness, witness.
December 30, 2007 @ 6:00 amEstimates of the dead range from 100,000 to 1.2 million (wikipedia). Including refugees and those terrorized (i.e. they or their families have lost lives, limbs, or significant amount of property.) one easily reaches millions, even if only 100,000 died. So the figures are correct.
Yes I am implicitly judging, but it is not my intent to judge. And as Christians we have to speak against evil and in speaking against evil we implicitly judge those responsible for evil.
If Saddam or the Taliban kill people, that is their fault and if the people they oppress (Iraqi’s, Afghani’s) want your help (as a mugged traveler obviously does), then it is a good thing to help. At the moment the Iraqi’s and Afghani’s want U.S troops out, so the analogy does not apply.
And they never wanted the U.S. troops in the first place.
Would you have liked it if Britain had tried to stop the U.S. civil war by occupying the U.S.? And would the war even stop, or would it lead to a independence war, like we have in Iraq at the moment?
Regardless of how many Vietnamese died in their civil war, I think it’s safe to assume that much less would have died if the U.S. had never interfered. (And their probably wouldn’t have been a civil war if the French had given them independence, or never colonized them in the first place.)
Fact is, that if you or your family members would have been killed or terrorized by foreign forces, you would not like it.
December 30, 2007 @ 3:30 pmYou would also not like foreign countries to meddle in your internal affairs, now or in times of history when you ‘needed’ (by your own standard of ‘need’) it.
So by not treating others as you yourself would like to be treated, you are not loving them.
Also, I read your blog (and have for a long time, primarily because of the pro-life and pro-christian content) and others like it.
And they are my primary sources, with some wikipedia, bbc, nytimes, etc thrown in.
I hardly, if ever, visit left-wing sites like dailykos.com. With the notable exception of reddit and slashdot (for the nerd stuff).
One of my most respected Christian ‘leaders’ is Anne van der Bijl (Brother Andrew) who gained fame during the cold war for smuggling Bible’s behind the Iron Curtain (maybe you know his famous book, God’s smuggler) and is now known for his organization Open Doors that aides the church in hard (islamic/communist) countries and does a lot of successful evangelism there. He has been a critic of these wars from the beginning, because they are hurting the churches and frustrating the evangelistic effort.
Because of these wars Christianity is seen by muslims as a religion of hate, war and oppression. Christians and missionaries active in these regions have to go out of their to disassociate themselves from America and American Christians.
He started me thinking and now I am converted.
I challenge you to find any long-time missionary active among muslims or in muslim countries that is in favor of these wars. I know none, but know many that are against them.
This proves that Christians who are in favor of the war, put other interests above the cause of Christ. What are those interests? Democracy? Nationalism? Oil? Land? I have no idea.
December 30, 2007 @ 3:46 pmWhoa, Whoa, Whoa. First of all, don’t bring in a quote from Wikipedia to a discussion and expect it to be considered legit. Secondly, hypothetically if you are correct and it is as high as 1.2 million, you are assuming that its us that have killed 1.2 million people which is not the case.
Now, you also make a flat out incorrect assumption that had we not intervened in Vietnam that there wouldn’t have been as many killed. That is flat out wrong. Vietnam was a French colony who made a mess of things in the 1950’s. They left which created a power vacuum in Vietnam which resulted in the North (supplied by China and the USSR) to impose its will on the South. The VC and the North were having a grand ole’ time slaughtering Southern Vietnam Catholics and Buddhists long before we got there.
Secondly, Cambodia was taken over by the Khemer Rouge, who killed 2 million people after we left, and that was going to happen had we been in Vietnam or not due to the fact that they were funded and armed by the Chinese and Russians.
Now, you are saying that this war had been bad for evangelism in Iraq. Well, what about the 10,000 plus, Iraqi Christians that became refugees under the Saddam Hussein regime? The Christians in Iraq have been under persecution for much longer that since 2003. Besides Christians, how many Kurds did Saddam gas?
No one likes war, duh. Should the US have fought a Civil War, where we lost half of a generation of men? Should we have fought wars in Europe to stop Nazi aggression? I mean there was way more death in those wars than in this one? Should Americans and the world intervene in the Sudan where our brothers and sisters in Christ are getting hacked to death with knives? I don’t know, but you seem to think if any war is fought and people are killed that its wrong.
Did Christ codemn the Roman centurion even though he was occupying Israel in Luke 7? No, he praised him for his faith and healed his servant. This is a fallen world, there will always be war until He returns. If we try to rid the world of evil while protecting ourselves, then I’ll understand. If its for war, oil or revenge, then I’ll be the first to jump on your side.
Read up on Just War Theory, its quite enlightening.
December 30, 2007 @ 7:00 pmThe Muslims have an ever-expanding list of grievances for why their civilization is such a disaster, and all of them involve blame-shifting the problem onto infidels, usually the Jews.
I don’t know how much of Islam you’ve actually studied, but Qur’an points to Christians and Jews as enemies in Surah 1, right in the beginning of the Qur’an. Whether we do anything to them or not, they will still see us as ‘crusaders’ and ‘zionists’, when in fact Islam is responsible for about 90% of the agression, dating back to 600 AD. If you need further proof, read Bostom’s 1000 page “The Legacy of Jihad” regarding Islam’s conquests throughout the past millenia and a half.
I do agree that the invasion has been entirely bad for Iraqi Christians and the idea of trying to democratize Muslims is idiotic, but it doesn’t affect whether or not they’d blame us for everything wrong with them. Islam generates paranoia in the minds of its adherents because Mohammed was a paranoid schizophrenic as a result of numerous epileptic seizures. His paranoia found its way into the canonical texts of Islam, most notably the Qur’an. Just read it, you’ll see. Since Muslims hold Mohammed to be “The Perfect Man”, literally the perfect example of faith and action, they emulate him. They see a Jew or a Christian behind every unfortunate circumstance.
December 30, 2007 @ 8:07 pmIn your original comment you said America was “killing millions.” In the first place, for it to be “millions” there would have to be at least 2 million. In the second place, as I’ve argued, no one has made a serious estimate that even reaches 1 million. The highest figures for which there is any support are the ones published in the medical journal Lancet. I believe they estimates 600K killed. However, there were serious problem with that research and the people who did the study have refused to release the details of their estimation methods to other groups, making it impossible to replicate or critique their results.
In the third place — as I noted before — most of those killed were killed as a result of Islamic militias, such as the one run by al Sadr in Iraq. Therefore, even if 1.2 million had died (and they haven’t) my support of the war would not be responsible for most of those deaths. In short, your original comment was a vast overstatement of the situation.
If you want to argue we made a mistake, fine. I think we made several, some of which have probably contributed to the loss of many lives on both sides. But throwing out wild numbers doesn’t help your case.
I only know one missionary active in Muslim countries but he retired recently after receiving death threats and a warning from a local Imam. I don’t know his feelings on the war. Off the top of my head I do know one priest who enlisted after the war began and became a chaplain. Here is his blog.
Again, throwing out the suggestion that this is a war for oil or land is just silly and not helping your argument. You may not have been reading DKos but when you talk like that it sure sounds that way. Democracy is a goal, definitely. I’m not sure why you’d think that democracy wouldn’t be in the interest of missionaries.
Even if it wasn’t, I don’t think people should have to live in hellish autocracies to further the work of missionaries. It’s a silly argument which should embarrass the missionaries who make it.
December 31, 2007 @ 1:13 amI didn’t claim that the U.S. killed millions, my claim is that the invasion is responsible for impoverishing, terrorizing and killing millions. 4.4 million refugees (UNHCR), at least 100.000 dead (the lowest estimate, can you find a lower one?) and assuming that for every dead a multiple have been injured or lost a beloved (a reasonable claim), we easily get millions of impoverished, terrorized people.
And the point is, that there would not have been a civil war if there was no U.S. invasion.
The difference with WWII is that European allied countries wanted your help AND Germany/Japan attacked or declared war.
In Iraq none of these is the case. And all polls I can find indicate that a minority of the Iraqis want the U.S. in. Can you find any that say otherwise?
I make no apology for Islam, or Saddam. They are both evil.
I fully subscribe to the just war theory, and know it quite well.
Obviously better than you, no pre-emptive war can ever be just, war can only be a last resort.
There is a reason all Christians in the rest of the world have condemned it (Europe, Africa, Latin-America).
I did not “throw in the statement that the war is for oil or land” and you are falsely accusing me for saying so.
The fact remains, living conditions under Saddam were heaven compared to living conditions under U.S. occupation.
And be reasonable. FIRST you demand specific numbers and NOW you accuse me of throwing around wild numbers?
Do you have any better numbers?
A chaplain does not make a missionary, but I fully agree that democracy would be better for missionaries. But spreading democracy is not a just cause for war.
And get this straight: I am not arguing you made mistakes with the war: I am arguing that you, as a Christian, have broken the biggest commandment of them all, to love your neighbor, by invading their country and causing them to suffer, even though they did not harm you.
The fact that godless people like to invade other countries is something I have learned to live with.
The fact that professing Christians can partake in this evil and even try to justify it, is what saddens me.
Anyway, I realize that pride would prevent you from admitting you are wrong on the war in this comments section, so I’ll leave it at this. But I’m praying for you.
December 31, 2007 @ 10:11 amThe government went to war, not the Body of Christ. I think you’ve got the two kingdoms confused.
Loving your neighbor pertains to the individual Christian’s duty toward his fellow man. The government’s job is to protect the people as necessary (Romans 13), which is what Bush originally set out to do. As the Bible sees it, Bush at least went to war with the right intentions. I think he firmly believed, as did the two presidents before him, that Saddam was a very serious threat. It turns out that Bush didn’t plan for the unintended consequences at all, and tried to spin the moral justification for war as ‘democratizing’ after the fact. Either way, the job of government is not to ‘love your neighbor’, it’s to be a terror to wrongdoers, so Christians are not hating their neighbor by supporting the duty of government, as they are in this case.
December 31, 2007 @ 11:09 amJ,
Here’s what you said:
In fact I don’t support any of those things. My desire is to see us win the war in Iraq, i.e. reduce the level of violence among militias, stop the mayhem and restore order and productivity. I do not support terror, impoverishment or killing of millions without any justifiable reason. Got it?
We are not responsible for the acts of murder and brutality committed by others. This is an absurd standard and, again, one which would fit in well at the Democratic Underground.
Officially the conflict with Iraq didn’t end after the Gulf War. There was a cease fire which required Iraq to follow certain obligations specified by the UN. Iraq failed to meet these obligations (such as allowing weapons inspectors unfettered access to all parts of the country). Iraq also regularly committed acts of aggression against our planes which were doing flyovers of the North in an effort to protect the Kurds from being massacred. Locking missile radar on one of planes and even firing upon them are acts of war. Finally, the US congress voted overwhelmingly to authorize the use of force in Iraq after three consecutive UN resolutions with which Saddam refused to comply.
Since we’re being very precise now, here’s what you said:
And here’s what I said:
I’ve added the italics so you can see I never claimed it was a statement, only a suggestion. It certainly was that and there’s nothing false about how I characterized it.
I’m trying to be reasonable. Asking you for proof of the “millions” comment and suggesting that your numbers were wild are not mutually exclusive. The 100K number is reasonable. Even the 600K number is defensible (barely). But again, your only acknowledgment of the fact that US forces didn’t do most of the killing is to say that it wouldn’t have happened if the US hadn’t invaded.
Blaming the US for the murderous actions of Islamic militants trying to defeat us is absurd. It’s like saying, LA street gangs wouldn’t shoot so many cops if the cops would stay out of their neighborhoods. Well, yes, I’m sure that’s true. It’s also not how things work generally. You might be willing to cede the world to autocrats (or LA to street gangs) but I’m not. We disagree.
I agree with you here. It’s not enough. But as I noted above, Saddam gave us all the provocation necessary. It turned out we were wrong about his WMD capabilities (that or he moved them out of the country, possibly to Syria). In any case, democracy wasn’t the only justification it’s just the only one left.
No one (including yourself) intended to cause Iraqis to suffer, with the exception of Saddam and his loyalists and later of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Immiserating the populace was surely not the goal. But now that we’re in Iraq and have made some mistakes which have protracted this unnecessarily, we have a choice of abandoning it to chaos or trying to make the best of a bad situation. We’re doing the latter, which I think is the better course.
Bottom line, I don’t think loving one’s neighbor includes letting them get massacred en masse by Al Qaeda, al Sadr, Quds Force or whatever other strongman enters the power vacuum in Iraq. We are protecting the Kurds and Sunnis from hell on earth right now. I support that even if they don’t always appreciate it.
But it’s also not true that everyone in these countries consider us unwelcome. Here’s a poll of Afghanis which showed a plurality in support of our attempt to rid them of the Taliban. The majority of Iraqi’s also don’t long for a return to Saddam’s reign. It’s a long way from universal love and acceptance, but under the circumstances those are pretty good numbers. Iraqis support the “occupation” of their country more than Democrats do in this country.
December 31, 2007 @ 12:10 pmSorry, you’re right, I did suggest oil/land. And I apparently did not read your post well enough.
For the record, I don’t think the intention of the war was oil (or land).
Though I am of the opinion that some U.S. companies (Blackwater and Haliburton) are profiteering from the war and that the US is in violation of international standards (and just war principles) that mandate that only nations and militias may conduct war, not hired private contractors.
I also fully agree that protecting people is a just cause for war. But if the people of Iraq wanted U.S. protection is up to debate. (Sadly, no one could have polled them before the invasion.)
And I think that in these last two posts you are much more reasonable than in the former ones.
I’m not accusing U.S. forces of whatever the Iraqi’s do, but I do maintain that the invasion was the cause of the current instability.
I’ll also agree that Saddam was in the wrong and that Iraq violated U.N. sanctions.
But to actually invade Iraq required U.N. authorization, which the U.S. tried to get when Colin Powell presented the evidence for WMD to the UN. However the evidence was found lacking by the UN disagreed, so the US and the UK went it alone and since then it has been proven beyond reasonable doubt that there were no WMD.
Also, the war in Afghanistan is less a moral issue since the Afghani’s don’t mind the occupation, and the violence there is much less than in Iraq. (And the U.N. was involved.)
And ofcourse no one wants Saddam back.
But not wanting Saddam back is not the same as wanting a U.S. occupation.
But I agree that, whatever happened in the past, we should make the best we can of the situation in Iraq.
(A public apology that the U.S. was apparently mistaken on the issue of WMD’s would be a proper thing to do though, IMHO.)
As the hot air link says, while the occupation is an improvement in Afghanistan, it is not in Iraq.
Since most Iraqi’s want the U.S. out, and since the U.S. occupation there is on of the direct causes for the civil war in Iraq (which to the insurgents is a war of freedom),
the best response is to make a plan to withdraw in an orderly way, while trying to prevent ethnic cleansing.
Perhaps with a military presence in Kurdish and Shiite parts of Iraq (if the locals want it).
But with the current plans to occupy Iraq indefinitely, against the wishes of the Iraqi people and causing those Iraqis to suffer a civil war. To support that is cruel and unjustifiable.
I agree with Huckabee and McCain that the honorable thing should be done, but there is no honor in sustaining a civil war.
Also interesting:
That means 5 million lost a family member or relative. I count those among those “terrorized”, and to let so many people suffer like this requires a very strong justification, which is absent.
Back to Vietnam: Yes, when the U.S. left many died and if the U.S. leaves as disorderly as they left in Vietnam, we can expect the same in Iraq. So an orderly withdrawal is better.
But I think you can agree that a scenario where the current situation endures for another 10 years before the U.S. withdraws would be much worse than a scenario where the U.S. withdraws now.
And if I sound too much like a Democrat, I can assure you that virtually everyone in the rest of the world does. American republicans truly are alone on wishing to continue the occupation of Iraq.
December 31, 2007 @ 3:21 pmWhat happened was that Bernard Lewis and Iraqi Shiite leaders told Bush before that the US would be welcomed as liberators. Bush, being intellectually lazy and morally confused, believed them and felt that everything after the war would be just fine. In reality, the Shiites saw the US invasion as an opportunity to grab power for the first time in a long time and throw off the yoke of teh Sunnis. Perhaps if Bush and Co had spent more time on JihadWatch before the invasion, things would be different. But alas… Either way, both Republicans and Democrats were saying Saddam was a threat, but who knows the reason they said this?
In the case of Kosovo and our support of the Albanians has been absolutely disastrous, and we’re adding yet another Islamic republic to the soft underbelly of Europe, so yet again we rushed in like an elephant in a china shop.
Our support of the mujahideen in Afghanistan under the Soviets was not the greatest idea, in retrospect, and neither is our support of the Turks against the Kurds. Neither is our support of ‘the roadmap to peace’ in Palestine, which involves selling the Jews down the river to the Islamic savages. I’m certainly sympathetic to a non-interventionist foreign policy. I just don’t think our elites can help but meddle. Spending a lot of time in Washington and attending elite universities tends to convince one that they’re smarter than everyone else. I have the distinct feeling that America will reap what it’s sown in the very near future, however, especially considering we’re letting all these people move to the US.
January 1, 2008 @ 2:26 pmI’m not sure that there is any way to make Chritianity and/or America appear like a good thing to the worlds Muslims, but surely that’s something worth aiming at? The invasion and occupation of Iraq really hasn’t been helpful in that respect – and I would add Britain into that statement, too.
I know that I’m a self confessed left winger, but am I the only person here who can’t see the fact of Iraq having the second largest oil reserves in the world being left entirely out of the decision making process regarding the invasion?
Btw – Jeiel – where are you from, if you don’t mind me asking?
January 2, 2008 @ 3:35 pmAmen to PRCalDude on his Kosovo comment, that has proven to be a disaster that isn’t reported. We backed the wrong horse in that one. The media kept reporting that the Serbs were the aggressors (and they were to some extent) but they said nothing on the atrocities committed by the Albanian Muslims in that conflict. Europe is spinning down the drain. The problem is in countries like France and England with huge Muslim youth populations is that those nations have nukes.
January 2, 2008 @ 11:29 pmNow I’m really confused Jeiel. You made a comment that you understood just war theory, and then said, “I also fully agree that protecting people is a just cause for war.” Just war theory says nothing about that. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is that the Saddam did have WMD’s (because he used them on the Kurds and in the first Gulf War) and didn’t show evidence that he got rid of them. So, we were justified in going in to enforce the UN’s laws and protect ourselves. The problem was we didn’t find them, we found some shells and cannisters and a few empty labs, and that made us look bad, but its not true to say that there were no WMD’s.
Also, we along with the UK didn’t go in alone, we had Poland, Italy, Spain, Australia, Romania and 13 other nations send troops in with us.
John’s right, it would be irresponsible to think that loving one’s neighbor involved allowing thug dictators and islamic radicals to continue slaughtering people for the sake of stability. I mentioned the millions of Kurdish victims and refugees pre-invasion. So had we not gone in, what would the poll data be on families that lost loved ones to Saddam’s regime? And if we had a crystal ball, what would the poll data on lost loved ones be if we leave and allow an extremist government to fill the vacuum?
The situation is bad, you are right, but be more angry and the fact that Rumsfeld and others didn’t know how to execute the war and the peace, not with the initial decisions.
January 2, 2008 @ 11:29 pmEric -on Iraq I think you have the main point summed up; the thing to be annoyed about now is that nobody had a clue how to execute the war and the peace, nor did anyone seem to think they needed much in the way of a plan for that.
I disagree about the WMDs – I don’t think Iraq had them at the time of the invasion. For some reason I believe Sadam was bluffing in the hope that the West would think he had WMDs but somehow wouldn’t invade. It seems an insane plan, because it was.
I have to question one thing though – the huge Muslim population in the UK. At the last census (2001) it was 2.7%. There are plenty of statistics that can appear to make the Muslim population seem more of an issue than that:
33% of the British Muslim population is under 16
36% of British Muslims are leaving school with no qualifications.
18% of male Muslims in England and Wales aged 16-25 are unemployed compared with a national average of 13%
68% of Bangladeshi and Pakistani households are living below the poverty line
Those statistics are concerning when you consider the potential for radicalising young British muslims into home grown terrorists. But huge is quite an overstatement.
I’ve also got to disagree with you on Kosovo. Far more bad stuff was done by the primarily Orthodox Christian Serbs in the whole break up of Yugoslavia than by everybody else put together. Concentrating on the atrocities committed by the persecuted ethnic Albanian minority would be to grossly distort the truth of that situation. They did hideous things to the Serbs every chance they got, but in their situation most populations would react the same way.
January 3, 2008 @ 1:16 pmKeith,
Don’t think that my comments were letting the Serbs off the hook, or that I was saying “Those Poor Serbs.” I’m saying that in hindsight, it was a mistake because NOW, there are several incidents reported of Muslim atrocities committed against Orthodox nuns and churches in Kosovo. Moreover, even after we helped the Muslims in the late 90’s, some of them show their grattitude by plotting to blow up Fort Dix and holding training camps.
The media painted us a picture of the Serbs and only the Serbs as the bad guys. They did the same thing in the early 90’s when it covered the Chechens war against Russia. Thus, for the longest time I had no idea just how evil some of these groups are because they were painted as victims.
In acutality what was going on was greatly blown out of proportion. Julia Gorin in Frontpage mag did some excellent research on this. The mass graves and refugee situation never turned up five years after the fact.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID={37ECF24D-7A82-49DD-962F-7AF1724CE69F}
I will, however, go along with your logic that maybe Saddam wanted to make us (or Iran) think he had WMD’s to make himself look stronger than he was. However, the fact is that he did use them in the 80’s and 90’s and again never showed to have dismantled them.
Also, in my comment about the British population in Britain, I did say they had a large (huge) young population and you are right its small now, but is growing and becoming more radical. Maybe huge was a bit overdramatic. Read Lodonistan by Melanie Phillips, it details the situation much better than I could.
The fact that Europeans aren’t reproducing and Muslims are will shift the demographics a lot sooner than we think. In other cities in Europe like Brussels and Stockholm they have control of neighborhoods that police and ambulances will not enter because of the danger they pose.
Anyway, we see in Paris what a decent size young Muslim population can do. They can destroy a lot of property.
Excellent points sir, I enjoy the discussion
January 3, 2008 @ 7:59 pmEric and Keith,
I’m just enjoying the exchange between you two. Keep going!
Scott
January 3, 2008 @ 8:23 pmGlad to have you as always Keith (and you too Jeiel). But about this:
That’s true, but we get a very small percentage of our oil from Iraq, under 5% I believe. Russia and France get a large portion of their oil from Iraq and, coincidentally, were the two nations against deposing Saddam. Remember Jacques Chirac?
We didn’t go in after oil and we haven’t been compensated for our efforts. In addition to the 3,000 lives lost we’ve also spent about half a trillion dollars and gas is up a dollar since the invasion and scheduled to go higher still. So the idea that we did this to benefit our financial/energy situation is a sad joke at this point. It’s also just not accurate. If oil was the issue, we’d have let Saddam stay exactly as France and Russia wanted us to do.
January 3, 2008 @ 10:56 pmHi Eric – i wiil have a read of that frontpage article, but i can’t get the link to work.
I have Londonistan by my side now, but will comment on it when it’s read. I, too, enjoy the discussion!
John – I meant to imply more that the sales pitch PR mentioned being put to Pres. Bush would have been more along the lines of ‘you’ll be welcomed as liberators – oh, and did we mention the oil reserves?’ I did, previously, think that oil was a major factor in the decision process, but I no longer do. Another factor, to my mind at least, was that of ‘unfinished business’ between Bush Sr and Sadam. Why Sadam was allowed to remain after the first Gulf War, I will never understand.
January 4, 2008 @ 6:55 amThe oil issue is the most idiotic one raised by the Left. If we cared that damn much about oil supplies, we would have just let Saddam sell his oil, instead of imposing sanctions on him in the form of an oil embargo. With more oil on the market, the price of oil would go down. The very reason we put the embargo on him in the first place was because of his weapons, which we thought posed an international threat, and the Kurds.
“Oh”, they charge, “it’s so Halliburton and Exxon-Mobile could actually *own* the oil, and reap all the profits.”
It’s a big capitalist conspiracy, you see. Oil companies told the US to go to war so that they could take the oil from the Arabs and sell it for fun and profit, and count their money on mahogany boardroom tables with their fat, greasy little fingers whilst smoking and laughing maniacally.
January 4, 2008 @ 12:01 pmKeith – I’ve wondered, also, why we didn’t just take Saddam out during the Gulf War, and have come to the conclusion that Bush, Sr., had a pretty good idea what would (and has) happen. I truly, really, sincerely want to support President Bush, but I’ve come to the conclusion that going into Iraq was a big mistake; however, now that we’re there, we have to win – withdrawal or defeat would be disastrous. Of course, the problem is, that the Iraqi people have to want democracy. Therein lies the rub.
January 4, 2008 @ 1:00 pmCarol – I think you’re spot on in your assesment there. As in so many areas of life, we have to deal with the reality rather than pondering what we coulda woulda shoulda done. All too often easier said than done, though, at least in ones personal life.
PR – I maybe should have been clearer in what I was saying. I think influence over the worlds second largest reserves of oil was considered strategically important, rather than ownership of it. The ability to realistically counteract the actions of OPEC etc in a meaningful way in terms of how much oil goes onto the market when, and maybe to whom it is sold. Your last paragraph is pretty close to what I thought a few years ago, with the addition of the detail about the endangered tropical hardwood boardroom table. We all have skeletons in our closets, I suppose.
January 4, 2008 @ 2:38 pmBecause liberals would have resisted deposing him (exactly as they did for 8 months prior to the invasion) and Bush 41 didn’t want the hassle. Lot of good it did him and us.
January 5, 2008 @ 11:56 amI seem to recall George the First vowing to stay out of Baghdad back in ‘91. It may have been a move to appease the Dem’s, but I had to respect him for keeping his word.
January 5, 2008 @ 4:54 pm