Muzzies, Godwin's, and Liberal Media BiasFollow

Great another ******* in government!

IMO, this quote says it all and really highlights the difference in basic viewpoint on global issues between Dems and Republicans:




IMO, the flaw with this reasoning is that it plays on the idea of creating a state of victimhood and the "getting stuff" for it (pretty classic liberal concept really). As if somehow being a victim of a terrorist attack creates "good will" and should then be used somehow for some gain.

Maybe this is a shocker, but that's not how things should work. We should be doing things because they are the right thing to do, not because we were victimized to the correct degree to justify the action we're taking. The very idea that the world should take action based on that measurement is also "odd" to me. It puts one in mind of a system where one sits around waiting to be a victim so that he can then act, but only to an "appropriate" degree. Not surprisingly, in this model, there's no motive to actually fix the problem that makes you a victim. Afterall, if you don't let the terrorists periodically attack your people, how can you "build good will" with the other nations of the world? Or at least that seems to be the direction he's going with this.


I also seriously question his idea that had we acted only against terrorists in Afghanistan and only those directly involved in the 9/11 attacks that this would have magically allowed us to eliminate the problem. Guess what? The guys on the "other side" don't think that way. They aren't going to look at a limited response as a deterent. They're going to see that as weakness (and do). Had we done that they'd just have shrugged and concluded that we can't possibly stop them since their overall organizational structure is already decentralized. So you take out one cell involved in an attack? Big deal? Those guys were all supposed to be willing to die for their cause anyway. That's not a deterent. It just lets them continue with business as usual.


It's a nice bit of pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking. Maybe he actually believes it. More likely, he just knows that it'll play well among those who want strongly to believe that the world would be a better place if we were just a bit nicer to the people who are trying to kill us...

I always like to list things in threes too.


Only if it leaves a mark.

Seriously, that whole statement is just crazy talk.

Sure. Because we'd just been the victims of an attack. I'd also point out that "helping in any way they can" apparently did not include resolving the situation in Iraq which ultimately was the root cause of the 9/11 attack in the first place.



First off. What do you mean by "building on this"? So we should use the fact that we were victimized to do what? Make people like us more? You say this in the same post you declare that it's not about taking advantage of victimhood status?

Secondly, the very fact that you believe that we invaded Iraq under a "pretext of self-defense" proves my point. You believe that a war is only justified if you were the victim of an attack from the nation you are at war with.

I think it's pretty clear by the very argument's that since there were no WMDs in Iraq, our invasion was unjustified, and the correlary argument that Iraq wasn't an "imminent threat" show that those opposed to the war form their viewpoint almost exclusively by measuring the degree to which our "victimhood" applied to Iraq. If Iraq wasn't an "imminent threat", then there was no reason to attack. Apparently, to your thinking (and most on the left) our victimhood from 9/11 entitled us to invade Iraq, but only if it could be shown that Iraq was definately about to attack us in a similar manner. Thus, the requirement from the left that Iraq must have WMDs, must be actively engaged with terrorists (and not just any terrorists, they must be Al-queda terrorists), with immediate plans to use those WMDs against us.

Those are the things that the anti-war left has most focused on proving to be incorrect, right? You can easily determine their requirements for war by looking at what they have argued weren't valid with regard to Iraq.

Of course, that assumes that you've accepted their requirements for war, which is not the case for all of us.



What common goal? I'm just amazed that you claim to be refuting my statement, and yet with every sentence you confirm exactly what I'm talking about.


Unfortunately, you probably wont understand what I'm saying either because you've so accepted the assumptions of your own ideology that it just doesn't occur to you that other people may have other reasons for doing things then the ones you have.

I guess I wasn't the only one to see the sky open up for a minute there...good.

I'd assume that Gbaji is making some connection that, post Gulf War 1, we kept troops in Saudi Arabia to man flights through the Iraqi "No Fly" zone. Those troops were part of bin Laden's public gripes against the US. Had Bush Sr taken out Saddam, we could have had our troops hanging out in Iraq instead.

This leaves us with two problems. One is that we're making the assumption that a US occupation of Iraq wouldn't have inflamed the same sort of people (or even bin Laden himself). The other is that, if we accept that leaving Saudi Arabia would have prevented the root cause of 9/11, it only lends strength to the notion that if we left the Muslims the hell alone they wouldn't be trying to kill us. Ironically, that second one flies directly in the face of Republican dogma.

That sentence is all it takes to show you don't have the slightest understanding of the threat we're facing. Seriously, after all the time, all the ink, all the blood, and all the money spent, you still refuse to understand this problem...

Islamic terrorism does not exist purely because of the fact that US troops are in Saudi Arabia. It's much bigger than that. That particular gripe is just one amongst many. And yet, it's the one you choose to focus on, because it somehow kinda justifies a link between the GW and 9/11.

It's total bullcrap.

Those crazy Islamists have a list of grievances that make the Mein Kampf look like a collection of hippy poems.

Wahabbism wants to impose a Caliphate on the whole world. That's the ideology behind it. That's their raison d'etre. So take all the US boots of Saudi, it won't change anything.

So, it's impossible to appease, or reason with these guys.

Impossible.

But the good thing is that until recently, they were a tiny minority in the Muslim world. The main reason they grew so much is because of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, when the mujahadeens were trained and armed by the CIA and the FSI (Pakistani secret services). All the while, their brand of hardcore, fanatical, litteralist, Islam was being funded by Saudi Arabia, awashed with our cash because of our reliance on foreign oil. You do know that Saudi Arabia is the main source of funding of madrassas in pakistan, when 4 year old kids are taught to learn the Koran by heart, and... nothing else? If there is one "ennemy state" in all this, it is Saudi Arabia. They are the ones who fund this poisonous ideology all over the world.

With our cash.

In 2000, Al-Qaeda was a bunch of tiny terrorist cells. It was "training" in Afghanistan under the Talibans, but enjoyed support from no one. Remember that the only country to recognise the Talibans in 2000 was Pakistan, because they had created them. No other country in the world recognised them, or wanted to be associated with them. Iraq hated them. Iran hated them. Jordan, Syria, Libya, Egypt, the Maghreb, Malasya, the Phillipines, not a single one of those Muslim countries recognised them. All it took was 20 guys, to execute 9/11.

So what does all this mean?

That the only way these lunatics can "matter" on the world stage, is if they manage to recruit more moderate Muslims to their dying and pointless cause. So yes, they use the US troops in Saudi Arabia, they use Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, the dictatorial governments of Egypt or Algeria... But these are lgihtweights compared to the arguments they have now: Guantanamo, the pictures of Abu-G, the never-ending Iraq war...

If in 2001, someone had told a Muslim that there was a war between the West and Islam, most would not have believed it.

In 2007, the situation is very different. It is completely possible to view world events through the West Vs Islam prism. Especially if you are a Muslim.

Invading Afghanistan was a completely necessary and beneficial move. AQ was training there, and the bordering region between Afghanistan and Pakistan is the hot-bed of modern fundamentalists. If there is one area of the world where US troops were needed, it's there.

Iraq had nothing to with all this. As Paulsol mentionned, the biggest threat to Saddam's regime (apart from the US), were the Islamic fanatics.

We totally played into their hands.

We need to realise that the battle that matters is not being fought here, in the UK or in the US. It's being played in Muslim countries, between moderates and fanatics. If the latter win, we are fUcked. If Musharaf gets assassinated and some crazy Islamist takes over, we'll have a fanatical Islamist state armed with nukes.

If the moderates wins, if the fundemantlists are exposed for what they are, we'll be fine, and we can go back to worrying about China and Russia, like in the good old days.

It's a propaganda war that's being played on this other side of the world. That's where the battle is, and that's why Iraq was such a gigantic ****-up. the sooner you realise this, the better.




Edited, Jul 18th 2007 10:38am by RedPhoenixxx

Damn, now I'm hungry

Double Nobby Rack TM

With the recent boom to ethanol, he is sure to have retired.

I did not say "islamic terrorism" as a whole. Stop changing the terms to suit the needs of your argument at the moment. I was specifically talking about why Osama Bin Laden directed his Al-queda terrorist network to engage in attacks against US targets (one of which was the 9/11 attacks).

For those who think that the presense of US soldiers in Saudi Arabia enforcing the UN sanctions on Iraq was *not* a (arguably "the") major reason for this, why not just read what OBL wrote?

The first hint is the name of his first fatwa Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places. You'd think the title would kinda say it all, but apparently some people are dense.



Later he writes:



You have to read the context around this one, but he's specifically talking about the decision by the Saudi government to allow US forces into the country to fight Iraq. There's some personal history with this decision involving OBL (and is part of the reason he had to flee Saudi Arabia itself). The main point is that he specifically mentions the Gulf war and its relation to the problem at hand.


And further down:



He's clearly talking about US presense in Saudi Arabia. Um... There's several paragraphs above this where he talks about making a difficult choice (specifically allowing non-muslims to fight wars that aid muslims if the need is great, a clear reference to allowing US soldiers to help defend Saudi Arabia from a potential invasion from Iraq), but goes on to talk about how allowing them to stay afterwards was warned about in the writings and must now be considered the greater threat (destruction of the culture and purity of the religion).

He proceeds to talk about how fighting against the Saudi government would be a mistake and would play into the USAs evil plan. He then rambles on for several paragraphs describing how gloriously each component of the Islamic faithful can fullfill their duties in this regard (various ways they can assist in attacking the US).

Another bit in case you're unclear about this:



Sure. But it has nothing to do with US soldiers on Saudi soil. Nothing at all...

And in case you're wondering if there was more then just our troops in Saudi Arabia?



Hey! Lookit that! He even specifically mentions how the UN sanctions are killing so many Iraqi children. But it wasn't about that, right? Yep. The UN sanctions were "working at intended" I suppose. There was absolutely no reason to change anything with regard to how we handled Iraq. Nope. Not one. Sigh...

And just in case we're still unclear, he mentions US forces in Saudi Arabia again:



For the uninformed, there was a bombing of a diplomatic compound in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia). The stated target of the raid was US soldiers who had been temporarily billeted there, but they weren't there when the bombs went off and no Americans were killed. Odd that he'd specifically mention this and say they'd "bombed the Americans in Riyadh", but he does. He's clearly endorsing the intent of the bombing, if not the actual results.



How many more facts do I have to put right in front of you before you recognize the truth about what happened and why? How much longer will you continue to wear blinders and refuse to even look at anything that disrupts your own little assumptions about the world?


It's all right there for anyone to read. Even you.


Oh. And that was just the first fatwa. The second one is even more clear. It's shorter too. Read it and then ask youself if my point about why Al-queda attacked us on 9/11 is "bullcrap".