I'm not at all sure that Bush and his advisers don't understand this. They just can't say it. Bush is limited by the political situation in which we find ourselves, after several decades of leftist brainwashing in our schools, colleges, and media. Maybe only a third of the country is really rotten, as they showed by voting twice for clinton. But there is a limit to how openly Bush can pursue this war. As it is, he is under continuous attack even for the little that he has openly said.
If he is re-elected I think he will deal next with Iran and Syria. Everyone who has followed the situation knows that the Saudis are at the bottom of the whole mess, but we cannot deal with them until we have taken care of these other tasks first.
The Iraqi people are no dummies: their name for those our PC press calls "insurgents" is..."Wahabis".
I don't quite see it that way, actually - there is no Constitutional prohibition against naming any organization as an enemy, especially one so overtly hostile so as the Wahhabis. And it is an organization of men that is being so named, not any system of religious belief. The Nazis had a very peculiar paganistic theology that was equally hostile, but it was not the religion that was the issue, it was the men with the guns, and it was not on the religion that war was waged, but on the ones using those guns to kill us.
That quibble aside, I am broadly in agreement with Mr. Warren on this issue. The Wahhabis are in a rather odd position with respect to their own state - they backed the House of Saud from the beginning, quite contrary to al-Wahhab's dicta that the doctors of Islam be the government. For that effort they became the beneficiaries of the regular charity that is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, only their benefactor was wealthy beyond anything in historical experience. With wealth came corruption, and lust for a secular power guaranteed them by doctrine but denied them by circumstance.
It would have been very difficult in the past to make this declaration given the traditional close relationship between the Saudi government and that of the United States, but now that the Wahhabis have decided to participate actively in destabilizing that country in an attempt to control the royal succession, all bets are off. They have flattered themselves that with money and covert military resources they can take on the largest State in the world; in fact, it may well turn out that they are incapable of utilizing it to subvert their own host state.
Certainly the recent public statements against terror by several prominent members of the ulema in Saudi Arabia were influenced by members of the royal family who are responding to the change in rules of engagement precipitated by the bombings in and about Riyadh. The question is whether those doctors of Islam are as much in control of "active measures" as they are of theological doctrine. If they are not then the declaration of the Wahhabi as formal state enemies is relatively useless; if they are, and if the Saudi royal family is really put to it, then "the bombing starts in five minutes."
How does one go about stamping out an entire religious sect or belief system, and why would we want to anyway? It would still exist even if just as an idea in peoples' heads. If they want to enforce the tenets of their religion amongst their own followers, fine. If they try to impose their ideals on others through violence, or Jihad, you simply make the price for it so awful it could never be countenanced. One doesn't have to "name" Wahabi Islam as the enemy. We know its members and which of those are promoting the violence. Take enough of them out, and the others will eventually get the message.
ping
Bookmark.
The Constitution is not a suicide pact, but whatever precedents are set in dealing with American Wahabis can be applied to American Baptists later.
Thanks.
Wahhabis are a major problem. So are the Khomeinists in Iran. And a couple of smaller jihadist sects. That's the reason you can't single out wahhabis.
Pong
Oh he's right but he's also dead wrong in narrowing it down only to Wahabi Islam. The Iranian Fundamentalist Shiism is also the problem, and they aren't Wahabi.
Islam is the enemy, Bump
Fighting the Jihadi enemy would mean overturning the 20th century political and economic foundations to their roots. It would mean disrupting the Big Tent of political correctness; putting a prosperity heavily dependent on oil supplies at risk; and replacing an entire paradigm of international relations. For that reason the act of naming Wahabi Islam as the principal enemy will [be] evaded until it is absolutely unavoidable; until after a mushroom or biological cloud puts a period after the debate. (emphasis supplied)
And well it should be that the crashing of the entire world system which would be precipitated by such a declaration "should be evaded until it is absolutely unavoidable."
The Author also lays out the upside:
And the reason this is so important, he argues, is that it allows Homeland Security to use the appropriate kind of filter in rooting out the enemy.
Lets see, we should turn the world upside down, threaten economic catastrophe attendant upon the interruption of the flow of oil, and as Cannoneer points out, set 1.4 Billion Muslims against us so that a rent a cop at the airport can hassle boarding passenger just because he looks swarthy?
Hello?
What we should be doing is just the opposite, we should be setting 1.4 billion Muslims against the terrorists because the only way we are going to win this war is get the world of Islam to recognize that it must kill the terrorists to save itself.
When Bush first articulated a war against "terrorism," I read the articles that pointed out that this is historically the first war against a "tactic" and I thought Bush's locution mealymouthed even for someone as vocally challenged as he is. Now I accept that Bush has it right. We must not buck up our courage as with a shot of whiskey by flinging names about which cost us the very ally indispensable to the winning of this war and gains us nothing but a flash of self satisfaction.
A word of warning, without any accusation: The indispensable ally in this war is not Israel. It is not the UK. and it is is not Europe. It is Islam. Beware those who, to assure the fealty of the USA to Israel for the protection of the latter, would exploit our indignation and cause us to fling hateful but ultimately unnecessary accusations at a class of religionists who, however alien, are ultimately our indispensable partner in this war for our survival.
When criticized for his statements supporting a grotesque communist dictatorship after Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, Churchill replied, "If Hitler had invaded Hell I would at least make a friendly reference to the Devil in the House of Commons." Churchill's identification of the real enemy never went out of focus. His accumulation of a world alliance which he hurled against that enemy makes him the greatest man of his century. As odious as the Soviet Union was, he made it an ally, albeit aided by Hitler's aggression, which made victory possible.
The analogy of the vast resources in people, geography and materiel with which the Russians waged war against the Nazis is too pat to go unobserved in a war in which we need 1.4 billion allies, not 1.4 billion suicidal murderers.
Btt
bump and save