Iraq Confused the Issue
Bob:
You have been more than vocal recently about Islamic Terrorists. I think your concerns are well founded. Unfortunately all the BS surrounding the 9/11 - Iraq link totally appears to have reduced the debate to Bush Lied, stay the course, get out of Iraq, etc. without the public having a real discussion about how big the Islamic threat is and is Osama really behind all of it.
You really ought to buy the book or CD "The Osama Bin Laden I Know"...I think its by Peter Bergen, the CNN journalist who interviewed Bin Laden a long time ago.
The book is a collection of interviews, newspaper articles, news releases, etc. about Bin Laden and other terrorists over many years.
What the book makes clear is that the modern Jihad movement that started with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Because it suited our aims of keeping the Russians in check, we didn't pay any attention to Egyptian clerks, who seem to be the most influential in the Jihad movement. They called upon ALL GOOD MUSLIMS to go to Afghanistan to throw out the infidel. This they claimed was a pillar of Islam. Muslims from all over the world, but principally Arabs went to fight the Russians. Osama joined this movement, but he was like a rich school boy playing soldier to begin with.
As he gained stature, his gained followers, but his Jihad was aimed not exclusively at tossing infidels invaders out of Afghanistan, but at the West and Isreal. Many Jihadists clerics apparently condemned the 9/11 attacks because the US was not an invader (except in Saudi Arabia) and through its proxy Israel. By invading Iraq, more and more Jihadists of the Egyptian school began to adopt the Bin Laden view.
I can't spell these names properly so I won't try. The Jordanian Jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi-- who was supposedly always Al Queda's guy in Iraq, was not originally in full agreement with Bin Laden, and may never have been. He did however, communicate with Bin Laden and the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri,. The Abu Musab al-Zarqawi wants to foment civil war in Iraq, not just to kick out the US.
I believe he is a Sunni Wahhabi. He considers the Shia to be apostates. The Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, wrote him to keep his attacks on Shite mosques down until after the US was bounced from Iraq and a Shira law country could be formed in Iraq. His view (and presumably Bin Laden's) is that average Muslims can understand throwing out the US from Iraq, but the larger goals will lose support even in the Sunni community.
So to recap, the leader (deceased) of Al Queda in Iraq, only recently stated he was joining with Bin Laden's aims in Iraq. He actually is part of a separate Jordanian Jihadist movement, which until only a couple of years ago was not aligned with Al Queda.
The book doesn't talk about Hezzbola. But they are not Sunni. However, the enemy of my enemy is my friend appears to carry weight with its supporters. I doubt that the Syrian regime is Shite leaning. Yet most of the Muslim world won't condemn this group (at least publicly) because almost all of the non-secular Muslims are anti-Israel. How is the West going to force Islamic clerics all over the world....including the US to stop endorsing terrorism agains Israel, us and the West in general?
My view is that the cease fire in the Lebanon will be a disaster unless the UN is willing to go on the offensive against Hezzbola. American politics is so limited to sound bites that I doubt that most people in this country, and probably most politicians understand that there are probably 31 flavors of Jihadists, who will cooperate with each other without agreeing on everything.
What I am trying to say, and I think I am echoing your concerns that the Jihad movement is very, very dangerous. People who would be at each others throats, will united temporarily to fight us or Israel, and soon the UN.
In retrospect it may be that kicking Saddam Hussien out of Iraq was the dumbest thing we have done since Vietnam. Not because we are stuck in the middle of a civil war, but because there is a civil war that will spawn more Jihadists willing to fight the infidel, Iraq will be a mess when we leave, and finally, because this strenghtened the had of Iran and the Shia. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Iran was behind all of the bad intelligence that led to the war, calculated to put us in this untennable position.
People in our government who actually know something about Jihadist thinking had better come up with some strategies that cast some of these groups in a bad light and to convince the Muslim street that dying for Islam might not get you 72 virgins. Otherwise we are left with Texas Cowboy politics -- nuke um. And unless we have the stomach for killing millions, we are just poking a stick in a hornest's nest without any real benefit in the long run.
You have been more than vocal recently about Islamic Terrorists. I think your concerns are well founded. Unfortunately all the BS surrounding the 9/11 - Iraq link totally appears to have reduced the debate to Bush Lied, stay the course, get out of Iraq, etc. without the public having a real discussion about how big the Islamic threat is and is Osama really behind all of it.
You really ought to buy the book or CD "The Osama Bin Laden I Know"...I think its by Peter Bergen, the CNN journalist who interviewed Bin Laden a long time ago.
The book is a collection of interviews, newspaper articles, news releases, etc. about Bin Laden and other terrorists over many years.
What the book makes clear is that the modern Jihad movement that started with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Because it suited our aims of keeping the Russians in check, we didn't pay any attention to Egyptian clerks, who seem to be the most influential in the Jihad movement. They called upon ALL GOOD MUSLIMS to go to Afghanistan to throw out the infidel. This they claimed was a pillar of Islam. Muslims from all over the world, but principally Arabs went to fight the Russians. Osama joined this movement, but he was like a rich school boy playing soldier to begin with.
As he gained stature, his gained followers, but his Jihad was aimed not exclusively at tossing infidels invaders out of Afghanistan, but at the West and Isreal. Many Jihadists clerics apparently condemned the 9/11 attacks because the US was not an invader (except in Saudi Arabia) and through its proxy Israel. By invading Iraq, more and more Jihadists of the Egyptian school began to adopt the Bin Laden view.
I can't spell these names properly so I won't try. The Jordanian Jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi-- who was supposedly always Al Queda's guy in Iraq, was not originally in full agreement with Bin Laden, and may never have been. He did however, communicate with Bin Laden and the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri,. The Abu Musab al-Zarqawi wants to foment civil war in Iraq, not just to kick out the US.
I believe he is a Sunni Wahhabi. He considers the Shia to be apostates. The Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, wrote him to keep his attacks on Shite mosques down until after the US was bounced from Iraq and a Shira law country could be formed in Iraq. His view (and presumably Bin Laden's) is that average Muslims can understand throwing out the US from Iraq, but the larger goals will lose support even in the Sunni community.
So to recap, the leader (deceased) of Al Queda in Iraq, only recently stated he was joining with Bin Laden's aims in Iraq. He actually is part of a separate Jordanian Jihadist movement, which until only a couple of years ago was not aligned with Al Queda.
The book doesn't talk about Hezzbola. But they are not Sunni. However, the enemy of my enemy is my friend appears to carry weight with its supporters. I doubt that the Syrian regime is Shite leaning. Yet most of the Muslim world won't condemn this group (at least publicly) because almost all of the non-secular Muslims are anti-Israel. How is the West going to force Islamic clerics all over the world....including the US to stop endorsing terrorism agains Israel, us and the West in general?
My view is that the cease fire in the Lebanon will be a disaster unless the UN is willing to go on the offensive against Hezzbola. American politics is so limited to sound bites that I doubt that most people in this country, and probably most politicians understand that there are probably 31 flavors of Jihadists, who will cooperate with each other without agreeing on everything.
What I am trying to say, and I think I am echoing your concerns that the Jihad movement is very, very dangerous. People who would be at each others throats, will united temporarily to fight us or Israel, and soon the UN.
In retrospect it may be that kicking Saddam Hussien out of Iraq was the dumbest thing we have done since Vietnam. Not because we are stuck in the middle of a civil war, but because there is a civil war that will spawn more Jihadists willing to fight the infidel, Iraq will be a mess when we leave, and finally, because this strenghtened the had of Iran and the Shia. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Iran was behind all of the bad intelligence that led to the war, calculated to put us in this untennable position.
People in our government who actually know something about Jihadist thinking had better come up with some strategies that cast some of these groups in a bad light and to convince the Muslim street that dying for Islam might not get you 72 virgins. Otherwise we are left with Texas Cowboy politics -- nuke um. And unless we have the stomach for killing millions, we are just poking a stick in a hornest's nest without any real benefit in the long run.
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