The Nature of the Threat

Pete Speer's "Time Zero" reduction is interesting and would probably be valid if you considered each religion as having evolved in a vacuum. Islam's Golden Age and the West's Enlightenment took place during periods of relative political stability; there were ongoing localized wars (think of Hatfield/McCoy covering all of West Virginia) but no major, treasury-draining conflicts. All that changed for the West after the Reformation and the religious wars spilled out over two hemispheres. It took a while, but things shook out to the point that the only "religious" wars between Christian sects have had political, not religious, origins. Okay, reset the clock--but think of the Renaissance and the Golden age as Time Zero. Proceeding up the Western side of the timeline, we see the Reformation followed by about two centuries of bloody, global warfare followed by a cessation of armed *religious* hostilities after the *secular* rulers looked around their respective fiefs and discovered that almost nobody was home anymore. Proceeding up the Islamic side of the timeline, we see the Sunni-Shi'a split had taken place a hundred years *prior* to the start of the timeline and the internecine warfare had flared briefly and then settled into a series of tribal feuds--which continue today, 1,200 years later. Islam and Christianity may have had similar timelines, but they have had divergent paths. Christianity had its religious wars early, then called b.s. on the idea of warfare-as-proselytizing. Islam--twelve centuries after-the-fact--has yet to have its sectarian, nation-depopulating wars to give the necessary impetus to an Enlightenment. In a perfect world, the Sunnis and Shi'a would learn from our own horrible, three-centuries-past example. This isn't a perfect world. Besides--there are a lot of *us* who haven't learned... On a side note, if I'd realized I was gonna set a Castle milestone, I would have posted something funnier, like John Kerry's latest gaffe: Sen. KERRY: "And there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the--of--the historical customs, religious customs. Whether you like it or not..." SCHIEFFER: "Yeah." Sen. KERRY: "...Iraqis should be doing that." *snicker*

Moral and cultural relativists would have us believe that Christianity / the West and Islam / the Arab & Muslim world are equally as bad and good as each other. But the reality is that the West is a better culture precisely because we've already progressed through the experiences, and learned lessons from, events like the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, industrial and social revolutions, civil wars, slavery, world wars, etc. - all while Islam has been basically suspended in the 13th Century. Moral and cultural relativists cringe at the "negativity" of being "judgmental". But you don't have to be perfect to be better.

Would these same individuals rather we went back to the draft? Yes. It would be a good way to further undermine support for the war and hopefull disrupt military effectiveness by creating a bunch of malcontents.

April, Not that anyone's asked, but here's my $00.02 worth. Hopefully, John will excuse me if I ramble, and I hope he and all the other professional military denizens of The Castle will excuse my amateur, layman's analysis: The war in Iraq was not just aimed at removing Saddam. There's a larger strategy at play here. As much of a danger as Saddam himself posed to the US and the Gulf region, I think after 9/11 the Bush administration correctly ascertained that IRAN was the larger threat, insofar as Islamist terrorists like Osama bin Laden / Al Qaeda / Hezbollah / Hamas, et. and their state sponsors was concerned. But I think the hope has always been - and still is - to AVOID a larger, messier war with Iran by changing the dynamics in the Arab and Muslim world by promoting freer, more open, and more democratic governments in the region. After 9/11, we recognized that our previous policy of tolerating authoritarian, despotic regimes like those in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain, Pakistan, and elsewhere in the Islamic world had become counterproductive. We had done so in an understandable, pragmatic attempt during the Cold War to keep them within our sphere of influence, and out of the influence of the Soviet Union and communism. However, that had become counterproductive because these governments had spoonfed their people a constant diet of anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Semitic propaganda to create external boogey-men for their native Muslim populations to focus on, thereby relieving internal pressures against their own authoritarian, despotic, and non-democratic regimes. Despite the current attempt by Dems and liberals to convince us otherwise, the status quo and "containment" clearly were not working. The militant, Islamist, Wahabbist ideology that our supposed friends, the Saudis, were exporting had begun to bite us in our tails. In order to prevent another 9/11, the Bush administration determined that the US needed to alter our policy of supporting these regimes and we needed to promote democracies. History has shown us that democracies rarely, if ever, war against each other. Saddam was a threat in several ways, not just with regard to WMDs. As long as he was in power, he not only posed a risk of increasing his WMD stockpiles, restarting his WMD development programs, and obtaining Iraqi nukes one day, but he still posed a direct conventional threat to Iran, as well as to other countries in the Gulf. And as long as that threat remained in the region and on Iran's western border, there was little hope of any pro-democracy movements succeeding in Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Syria, and the Iranian people would never feel secure enough to do what we hope they will do - stage their own pro-democracy Iranian revolution and THEMSELVES overthrow the mullahs who are clearly intent on developing their own nukes which they will use directly against Israel or against us via terrorist proxies. The war in Iraq offered several major elements in this strategy: 1) Getting rid of Saddam and the threats he posed, conventional or WMD. 2) Coupled with the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the establishment of a more democratic government under Kharzai, a democratic regime in Iraq would allow the US and our coalition allies to support pro-democracy factions within Iran that would pressure the mullahs, and hopefully encourage the Iranian people THEMSELVES to overthrow the mullahs. 3) If all of that failed, to provide staging areas for military action against Iran. After 9/11, and considering the recent comments of Iran's hardline president, can anyone doubt what Iran will do with its nukes if it gets them? The problem has always been TIME. We're in a race against the clock to prevent Iran's possesion of nukes. Now, thanks to the opposition of our domestic Democrats, Iranian mullahs and their Syrian allies, as well as other despots in the region (including the UN) whose power and livelihoods are threatened by pro-democracy movements, have felt comfortable supporting the terrorists and other insurgents in Iraq. What was already a very compressed time frame to prevent Iranian possession of nukes has become even shorter. Now, with even the IAEA's Elbaradei predicting that Iran is only months away from their goal, almost all hope of overthrowing the mullahs before they obtain nukes is gone. If the Democrats get their wish, and the US withdraws forces from Iraq, we'll: 1) Never have the credibility to deter future enemies or to expect potential allies to trust us again. 2) Experience massive chaos in Iraq and throughout the Gulf region, paralleling or exceeding what we saw when we pulled out of Vietnam - reprisals against friendly Iraqis, refugees, loss of any pro-democratic movements, regional instability, etc. 3) Leave Iraq and the region open for takeover by Al Qaeda as a sanctuary, just like Afghanistan was under the Taliban, in which they can train countless future terrorists and from which they can launch future attacks against the US. Of course, the Dems know all this. No one can be so myopic or short-sighted that they don't recognize the dangers inherent in failing to achieve our objectives in Iraq. The only possible explanation is that the Dems want the US to fail, but not just to "hurt Bush" and score electoral points. They want the US to fail because they WANT all these negative possibilities to come true. Why? To destroy the US's position as the sole superpower and defender of democracy and freedom. They hope that in the power vacuum that follows, the world will look to a supra-national, global organization like the United Nations to provide security, government, redistribution of wealth, and protection of the environment. Can anyone of us on the political Right imagine anything worse than a corrupt, morally repugnant UN as a global government and sole "protector" of our civil liberties and human rights? Scary. We must do everything to prevent this. We are indeed in a global war. But this is a much broader conflict, and Iraq is merely one battle in this larger campaign - which is social, ideological, cultural, and political, as well as military.