Freight Dog:
Rjan:
To reiterate, my point is that the CIA has exacerbated those features in societies that were moving beyond them!
Moreover, if we did go into Saudi Arabia, it would not solve those problems but it would create other even more grave problems than a minority losing hands and heads, which is exactly what has happened in the places we have invaded.
Ok I agree on that. That is a fair point. I also do agree on military action within these countries is and has been an historically poor thing. I take heavy disagreement with any sentiment that Islam is not anyway responsible for actions that happen on its doorstep. This lack of taking any ownership and squirrelly arguments is rubbing people up the wrong way.
But what do you really mean when you say “Islam is responsible”? Was Christianity responsible for Hitler? Were the German migrants or descendants in the old German African colonies responsible for Hitler? It’s just an absurd comparison.
We’re not fighting Islam - that’s not the origin of the conflict. We’re fighting the inhabitants of Middle Eastern and North African nations! They happen to be predominantly Islamic places, and many of those who subscribe to Islam in Western nations (or with access to Western nations) have a heritage in those places.
So there is a coincidental correlation in the first place, and then maybe even the organisation of a reaction takes place around a common religion (much as in the USA it revolves a great deal around Christianity), but the fight is not against Islam.
What has happened is that the people in the Middle East are bound latently, by common religion, with people all around the world, and that having started unjustified and ruinous military action, that has generated a huge sympathetic reaction well outside the borders of the conflict - and to be clear, if it had been justified, and not ruinous, there would have been a great deal less concern.
The real danger is not that we are fighting Islam, but that we might end up fighting Islam. The Catholic Pope doesn’t get involved in every schoolyard fight around the world and he’s not generally interested in worldly conflicts, but when a substantial Christian population are suffering the utter destruction of civilisation, he does get involved, and the Pope doesn’t need tank divisions, because on his say so he’s able to commandeer a quarter of the population of the world (across all other divisions like national borders) for a common purpose.
The Pope can make a phone call to almost any national leader in the West, or even turn up at their front door, and they will give him as much time to say what he wants, and he will invoke democracy, rule of law, liberal values, human rights, whatever, and some Western nation (if not all) will come up with the guns and the money and the men, and the foundations of civilisation (i.e. women, children, basic human infrastructure like houses and hospitals) which are being attacked out of all proportion, will be defended.
That’s how it works - it’s like the original ambulance service for civilisation and basic human values. And so disastrous has our foreign policy behaviour been in the MIddle East, that is the sort of reaction it’s now starting to generate.
Islamic religion is starting to act as an ambulance service, and a pivot on which a common military response is slowly and gradually becoming organised - and as our security services have now recognised, it doesn’t require physical links between men, all it requires is knowledge and sympathy, or even knowledge and outrage, and suddenly there are people starting to pick up guns or take other military steps.
People in this country who take an armchair interest, just don’t seem to grasp the scale of the folly, the horror of the scope of destruction we’re imposing under bland terms like “regime change”. This religious ambulance service is not something to be defeated or fought against, it’s something to be obeyed and respected, a sign that we’ve already gone far too far.
The million people who marched against the Iraq war in early 2003 including myself, a scale of protest unheard of, should have been heeded.
Bare in mind, a lot of people of the faith strongly agree with the laws and will not push come to shove do anything that is seen to betray them. Luckily for them, living in western Europe, they’re not placed in that position. Yet.
Living in a diluted society (althought its changing) they are free to dine out on a certain dichotomy of living out their religious beliefs but being governed and protected by a western society’s relatively humane laws.
Like I say, we’re not fighting Islam, and Islam is not fighting us, and we must stop our folly before we do end up in that situation.
