15000 Muhajadeen kicked out Soviet forces and brought about the collapse the Afghanistan, it took ten years. It doesn’t take many to break the will of the majority, you just got to have the balls to take whatevers thrown at you, and in the end you will succeed.
Well:
[Moderator Hat ON]
Well, you can’t call people retarded in this forum. If you absolutely must flame someone, do it in the BBQ Pit forum.
[Moderator Hat OFF]
Blame Wahabbism and its constant stream of hate it constantly enduces against anyone different from them.
No, theres only the percieved notion that we’re against their values, which at the core, are basically the same.
Which is why Iraqi democracy is exactly the thing which we should be encouraging, and democracy and freedom around the Middle East.
I personally don’t think bringing down the Saudis would bring any lasting peace, it would most likely destroy the world economy. Its good to at least bring freedom and democracy to some parts of the Middle East.
I’m not advocating bringing down the Saudis either. It would send the price of oil through the roof.
All I’m doing is pointing out that in the case of the Middle East our ideals call for one course of action and our interests call for a different one.
One of the mistakes I think the Bush administration is making is pretending that they’re congruent.
I don’t think so, because all ideologies of repression have been pretty much tried and tested in the Middle East, the only real last bastion of lasting peace within their societies is democracy and civil society.
I agree. In the long run. But in the short run the civic upheaval necessary to give birth to democracy in Saudi Arabia would play havok with the oil market.
I did not call anyone retarded. Many times I have seen him/her make the same remark under simillar circumstances and either people debate it and debunk it, or he/she posts it as a drive by. For him/her to keep making the same lame argument over and over seems a little slow to me.
Irrelevant. Sympathy and excuse-making for an enemy of civilization is contemptible, regardless of the power level that enemy happens to wield.
Your consistency test for today: Do you believe that people should just lay off Ward Churchill?
Not “reasons”, plural. Just one reason – “because those people are an obstacle to us being able to enslave everybody else”
That’s their one and only gripe, and it simply is not worth dignifying with the pretense that it is any sort of legitimate grievance.
The only ways to do that are 1)strengthen one’s own culture so that it imbues people with the character to resist the blandishments of foreign cultures, or 2)destroy foreign cultures. (Attempts at isolationism never work in the long run.)
The Wahabifascists understand at some level that their version of Islam is utterly incapable of the former.
(Bolding mine) And just why should they have western values considering they aren’t in the “west”? I suppose they should be Christian too? Christianity is a very important value to a majority in the “west”.
Except all Saudis are not Arabs. I believe that “Saudi” is the accepted term for a citizen of Saudi Arabia. As such, “Saudi” is not a good term to call the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It would be like calling the USA “American”.
[Quick, complete and total off-the-subject hijack: Once in college I used the term “frat” while talking to a guy who was in one. He responded in a snit, “Don’t call a fratenity a ‘frat’. You wouldn’t call your country a ‘cunt’, would you?”
“No,” I replied. “But I’d call you one.”]
Don’t blame me, you’re the one supporting the candidate who’s gotten 15,000+ civilians killed over some bushit about nonexistent WMDs. To say the death of 3,000 innocent New Yorkers is a tragedy while handwaving away the death of 15,000 innocent Iraqis is morally indefensible.
As for the OP, I continue to be amazed at the naivety of some posters who can toss out superficial comments like “western democracy is the only hope for saving the Middle East” without pondering how threatening that sounds. I’m sure the radical Muslims have similar beliefs about how their religion is our only hope for salvation, too…
You don’t think that the Western oil companies weren’t/aren’t ripping off large stacks of those trillions? You should read this book about Iran before, during and after the fall of the Shah. It explains in great detail how The British Petroleum company (controlled by the UK government at the time) in no uncertain terms robbed the Persians of much of their current and future oil resources. You will also find it asserted in that book that the Brits didn’t act alone, they had some help from their brothers-in-pillaging, the Americans.*
You can’t make that stuff up, 'cuz it’s true.
PS-- I pretty much shun the “nutbar left” too. It’s the logical, principled, visionary left (which greatly out-numbers the “nutjobs”) that one must watch out for.
*Does this mean all Americans pillage? No, of course not. Don’t go simple on me just yet, this thread’s not even a full three pages yet!
You just do not get it do you? The death of 3,000 innocent New Yorkers is not a tragedy. Their murders are morally indefensible. Your personal angst against Bush does not take away from that fact. Yet you insist on correlating them with the deaths in Iraq. Even if I were so callous as to casually dismiss the deaths of any innocents, your infantile insistance that one must consider them all equally tragic or be a hypocrite is beyond obtuse.
What about the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed under Saddams regime? What about the reportedly over a million children dead of malnutrition under post Gulf War Saddam? And if you even think about putting the blame on the sanctions imposed by the US, I will need to remind you that 90% of the time those sanctions were enforced, they were not done so under Bush.
If you have an axe to grind don’t do so at the expense of the brutality of the murder of 3,000 innocent civillians. And what really gets on my nerves is the fact that you keep trying to relate the two any chance you get no matter how many times people point out the fallacy of your argument.
Am I in Bizarro-World or is this a joke? Do you not realize that this is a strawman? Do you not realize that you’re acting like a total jerk in the wrong forum? Is everything you ever read or write completely oversaturated and dripping with political bias?
I told you the OP wasn’t politically motivated and I meant it. I really do know people in real life that think they [so to speak] “got bored one day and attacked us because they hate out freedoms.” But that wasn’t really a crucial point of the OP, was it? Aren’t you building quite a strawman here?
You seem to miss the obvious. Yes, technology places a lot of killing power in the hands of a small number of people. This is not an answer to the question of why they choose to use it.
We all have the same ability. But not all of us commit 9/11 just because we can.
I’d like to thank ralph124c ( was there a b & a version ?) for pointing out one big reason why fundamentalists (arab ones) have a big issue with western dominance. I’d like to point out that the US isn’t the only western “corruptor”… but certainly the biggest one.
Every society has its radical loonies. Assigning them as the reason for something like 9/11 in particular and Muslim terrorism in general isn’t really an answer.
Anti US terrorists are funded and active because they are the extreme outliers of a distribution that consists of a mass of people who wouldn’t dream of killing random strangers but are less than pleased with the US. That is sufficient to produce the tiny trickle of funding and recruits that is all that terrorists need.
Gotta love the word “they”. They’re all this and that. So good at papering over the gaping holes.