So Bush lied to get into Iraq, ok but why?

Great Debates
121

The subject of the quote I was responding to was the meme “they hate us for our freedoms”, which does indeed apply to Jihadis in general, and not Iraqis in specific. And yes, it was a tangent.

You’re truncating the quote and obscuring its actual point. First, it made clear that it was discussing the limited conception of only political freedoms that Bush saw. That’s why it specifically goes on to say “He did not recoil from political freedom and democracy, as, say, President Bush might expect from a jihadi theorist,”

You can exclude the “as… Bush might expect”, but then that obfuscates the fact that they were talking about Bush’s beliefs and expectations.

S’okay, you’re allowed to be wrong.

Well sheeeeeit. An article that mentioned “premeditated murder with malice aforthought” wouldn’t be about Murder One, either. Right?

The freedom to dress the way you want. The freedom to dance the way you want, to date, to listen to music, to choose your religious path, to change religious paths, to ignore religion entirely, to vote on secular laws, to not be bound by a theocracy…
All of those are freedoms that the west enjoys, even if you don’t name them, specifically “freedoms”.

And you are distorting what the article actually says. it did not say that he didn’t hate political freedom. It said he did not recoil from political freedom “as, say, President Bush might expect from a jihadi theorist*”. So he didn’t react to political freedoms in the way Bush would expect.

If you’re actually arguing, however, that he didn’t hate western political freedoms, you’re arguing in the teeth of the facts.

Yet again, as should be obvious, his feeling that the entire west was decadent and required the inflexible rule of fundamentalist Islam does, indeed, show that he hated our political freedoms. But as the article points out, not in the manner that George Bush conceived of that kind of hatred.

  1. The imposition of “[o]nly the strict, unchanging law of the prophet” is indeed diametrically opposed to freedom. Political freedom, social freedom, cultural freedom, sexual, religious freedom, etc. To pretend otherwise is to claim that theocracy and totalitarianism can coexist with all of those freedoms.
  2. A more accurate analogy would be like saying that that you demand your children follow a specific religion’s laws, strictly and without deviation or personal interpretation, and face the death penalty for apostasy. And thus, you won’t allow them freedom.

Sounds a bit different when we use the actual situation rather than a fallacious analogy of going to school.

As the article made quite clear, Qutb was a “leading theorist of violent jihad” whose ideas have gone on to impact the modern Jihadist movement. You can dismiss him as a nutcase and a fruitcake and what have you.

But as the Smithsonian makes clear:

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Why “sad”? Why “shameful”? If some of us live our lives with the belief that it’s wrong to cause difficulty or distress to others, what business is it of yours?

123

IMHO, Randians seem to make a virtue of evil. Of ruthlessness, of selfishness, of sociopathy. They define such things as ethics, caring for others, scruples as wrong, and then accuse good people of being dysfunctional or evil. A sort of inverted morality; what’s bad is good, and what’s good is bad.

124

I also remember when he landed on the carrier in flight suit and the commentator fairly giddy and drooling over how great he looked as he walked the deck and shook hands.

I was shouting at the TV. “YOU IDIOT!!”

125

1/ you said that his views were incompatible with political freedoms. Thus the fact that the article says he did not recoil from political freedoms is somewhat relevant to your lack of understanding of the article

2/ Luckily for you it is not crystal clear from the sentence whether it is saying he did not recoil from political freedoms, and that this is not what someone like Bush would expect, or whether it is saying that he did not recoil from political freedom in the particular way that someone like Bush might expect. I think the former, but you can read the latter as being open if you want to write in some extra stuff that isn’t there but isn’t specifically excluded.

Hollow triumphalism is actually an announcement that you haven’t got anything better. Just thought you’d like to know.

No it sounds exactly the same and in fact reinforces my point. You assume that someone who demands their children follow a specific religion’s laws, strictly and without deviation or personal interpretation, and face the death penalty for apostasy does it because they hate them to be free. Yet whenever I hear someone like that talk about why they do it, they invariably say they do it because they are absolutely and utterly convinced that it is best for their children if they follow this religion, and indeed think that it would be very bad for their children’s own sake if their children did otherwise. They never feel that they are motivated by hatred of the idea that their children should be free

There is as you say utter incompatibility between freedom and strictly enforced theocracy. But the hole in your logic is where you assume that a consequence is a motivation, without evidence.

“Leading theorists” in religion are powerless geeks whose theories are picked up and spread (or utterly ignored) at the whim of powerful people with agendas, as it suits them.

126

Oh, I get it, having an emotionally visceral negative response to the entire slew of freedoms the west has, believing that the west was horrible because it didn’t obey the strict theocratic dictates of fundamentalist Islam and wanting to impose strict theocracy on the entire world since those freedoms made it was “jahiliyya, that barbarous state that existed before Muhammad”, that just shows he was neutral on the subject.

Obviously, calling our freedoms barbarous and saying that they have to be abolished does not at all display hatred for them. Nopers. Just like wanting to totally eliminate freedom because you prefer theocracy and hate non-theocracy as barbarous doesn’t show that someone has anything against those freedoms, just something for theocracy.

Along the same lines, someone who shoots another person in the head has nothing against that person living, they just have a desire for their murder.

Bangup job.

Good job though completely ignoring virtually everything I said, ignoring why he did indeed hate political, cultural, social, religious, etc… freedoms, and instead pretending, yet again with smarmily vapid argumentation, that I didn’t understand the article since it described all the freedoms Qutb hated, but didn’t use the word “freedom” fifty times. :rolleyes:

Why you’ve decided to argue that a specific desire to destroy all of the west’s freedoms in order to replace them with totalitarian theocracy doesn’t betray antipathy towards those freedoms is beyond me. You have fun with that.

127

If one were “always at war with Eurasia” that war would have had to of been started at some point right? Or at least intensified to increase market revenue during sweeps.

128

The problem with this view - that they hate us for our freedoms - is that the freedoms have been around a lot longer than any expression of the hatred. Islamic terrorists might not like American civil liberties but that was never a cause they were willing to target America over. Their stated reason for attacking America had been the presense of American troops in Muslim countries. And this reason is confirmed by the facts:

The United States with “freedoms” but no troops in the Middle East - not targeted
The United States with the same “freedoms” and troops in the Middle East - targeted
Other countries with western freedoms and troops in the Middle East - targeted
Other countries with the same freedoms but no troops in the Middle East - not targeted

The linkage between “our freedoms” and being the target of terrorism seems pretty weak. But it does serve two useful purposes for domestic consumption. It deflects attention from the issue of whether we should have troops in the Middle East. And it links having civil liberities with being in danger, which supports the opposite idea that surrendering civil liberties makes you safer.

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Here’s my take on it. Of course at this remove I don’t have cites, but while it was happeningm I swear I saw opinion pieces from Neocon think tanks (and their critics) making precisely this point.

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There is a huge problem with that formulation, specifically, it’s irrelevant.
Things change. If Islamic Fundamentalists[sub]circa 1016 CE[/sub] didn’t object to sexual freedoms but Islamic Fundamentalists [sub]circa 2001 CE[/sub] do, the fact that they didn’t always object has zero relevance to the fact that they, currently, do.
There’s also the fact that Islamic Fundamentalists[sub]circa 1016 CE[/sub] are not the same people (being dead, and all) as Islamic Fundamentalists [sub]circa 2001 CE[/sub].

The quote I was referring to, however, was “why do they hate us” not “what justifications do they use for launching terrorist operations.”
The two are different questions.

Naw. It is, properly, an irrelevancy in those discussions. The nature of the policies is what we should consider.
Unless, of course, abortion clinic bombings should make us think about overturning Roe V. Wade.

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Nor does accepting that simple, thoughtless assertion of Bush’s that that is what motivates Al Qaeda, even though it accomplished its goal of dehumanizing and lumping “the enemy”. Bin Laden has made his desires pretty clear in his recorded speeches, and that ain’t it. His main issue regarding the West has been the presence of our forces in Saudi Arabia, while Al Qaeda’s main overall focus is on restoring fundamentalist purity to the Muslim world.

Qutb wanted to do that to the Muslim world. You might as well say that Ann Coulter’s desire to Christianize the Middle East means she hates the Arabs’ culture and wants to destroy it.

132

Exactly. Things change. And what was it that changed? Not the freedoms - they stayed the same. It was the presense of troops that changed.

In politics, as in so much else, you have to live with the “garbage in, garbage out” principle. If you’re starting with wrong information you’re going to end up making the wrong decisions. So get your facts right first.

133

Elvis: Yes, Coulter’s desire to eliminate Arabic culture and Islam and replace them with western culture and Christianity, rather unsurprisingly, evinces a hatred of Arabic culture and Islam.

Saying that “[w]e should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” is neither friendly nor neutral.

134

First off, you are simply wrong if you don’t think that the west has had a massive change in sexual, social, cultural, religious, etc… freedoms over the last 100 years, let alone the last few hundred. You’re also ignoring the fact that American culture, in particular, has become an unrivaled vector for changing other cultures via introduction of American memes and products, from Hollywood to Coca Cola, and that the nature of western culture was much easier to block out prior to the Information Age.

Second, Qutb founded a school of thought that hated us for our secular freedoms, while the west had already had troops and colonial outposts in the Middle East for decades, so obviously that did not, in fact, change. It’s strange that you’d claim it did. It’s also strange that you’ve ignored that the Jihadi movement did not spring up in the aftermath of WW I, and in fact took quite a bit more time to gather steam. When, after all, the Ottoman Empire had already been carved up and that fact not only didn’t change, but was the status quo under which Islamic Fundamentalism itself changed.

Moreover, the modern west has been militarily involved with nations in the ME since, at least, Napoleon’s Egypt Campaign and the Barbary Coast War. So likewise, that hasn’t changed, although it has intensified.
The medieval west ran the Crusades for centuries. So obviously that’s nothing new.
The ancient west, from the seat of power in Rome, ruled vast swaths of the middle east, and it is from them that we got the name “Palestine”. So obviously that’s nothing new.

Or as someone might put it:

Your premise that, rather than mutual shifts in Islamic Fundamentalism and western realpolitik it can simply be explained by saying “It was the presense of troops that changed”, is false to facts at best.
It also ignores the very real fact that modern Jihadist thought has, as its roots, a hatred of social freedom, cultural freedom, religious freedom, political freedom, sexual freedom, etc, etc, etc.

135

You got some good moves there but this isn’t my first dance.

So I noticed how you tried to slide in that “the west had already had troops and colonial outposts in the Middle East for decades” in a discussion about American troops.

So I’ll point out that the first major Islamic terrorist attack against an American target occurred on October 23, 1983 when Hezbollah bombed the MNF barracks in Lebanon. Now my theory is that the proximate cause of this terrorist attack was the deployment of American troops in Lebanon on August of that year. But I suppose you could make the alternative argument that the bombing was a response to efforts by American congressmen to re-introduce the Equal Rights Amendment to the states for ratification. Here’s how it might have happened:

“Achmed, have you heard the news?”
“About House Joint Resolution Number 638? Of course I have, Mohammed, it’s all anyone is talking about here in Beirut.”
“This is terrible, Achmed, if the infidels in Washington pass this bill it’s a major step towards American women getting legal protection against a wide range of gender-based discrimination.”
“It’s intolerable, Mohammed. How can we sit by doing nothing, knowing that women in a country five thousand miles away might have their legal rights expanded at some point in the future?”
“I know but what can we do? As foreign citizens we’re prohibited by American law from contributing to American political campaigns so we can influence their electoral process.”
“We must strike!!! If we are shut out of legitimate discourse in the American political process we must use violence!!! We shall kill Americans until they adopt a legal system that more closely resembles the Islamic ideal!!!”
“But how? We do not have the resources to attack the United States. If only there was some way we could strike Americans that were closer…”
“That’s it, Muhammad! I just remembered a conversation I had with my cousin last week. He runs a convenience store over by the coast and he told me that he’s been seeing a lot of Americans in his store lately.”
“Americans? Why are Americans here in Lebanon? Are they tourists?”
“No, Muhammad, according to what my cousin told me, these Americans are soldiers. And if what he said is true, they’re here because they invaded our country two months ago.”
“Really? We were invaded by the United States?”
“That’s what my cousin said and he’s usually very reliable.”
“No kidding. We should check into this. If it’s true what he said and there are American soldiers here in Beirut then they’ll be the perfect target for us to attack in order to show how much we hate House Joint Resolution Number 638!”

136

Nice attempt to change the subject while not engaging with any of the actual facts, especially like ignoring the fact that the American social, cultural and sexual landscape changed radically in the second half of the last century. Plus you tossed out an absurd strawman, nice! Neato!

First, your claim that things had changed, while obviously they hadn’t has not been retracted. You simply ignored that. Cool.
Second, as European nations had had troops/colonial outposts in the region for quite some time, you’ve provided not even a hint of a reason why American troops would somehow be substantially different. You haven’t even attempted to begin to explain how having Europeans occupy the ME was fine and provoked no Jihadi response, but American non-combatant peace keepers deserved death, ASAP.
Third, you’ve ignored the fact that at the time, Hezbollah was not a Jihadi organization and was, instead, set up by Iran in order to advance Iranian political goals.

Nifty.

137

I assume if you’re not a lier like that murdering sociopathic monster of an expresident, that you’ll cough up a cite about how Iraq “posed a clear and present danger”, as was the war criminal’s words.

Remember the monster said clear, not hypothetical.

138

And all those little tin soldiers to play with…

139

I wish the war had been about oil. That would have made a sense in a venal way, and the thing would have been carried out more competently and caused the Iraqis less pain.

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I don’t see that necessarily follows. Many’s the endeavor with entirely reprehensible goals that have foundered. Amway Orphanage, for instance. Scientology hospices.another example.