You said -- "We are not going to send waves of missionaries to try and convert Islam."
I'm not talking about sending missionaries..., I'm talking about sending bullets, right down the throats of any cleric or imam that supports Islam in taking over the government or having anything to do with the government. Summary executions for them all, the minute one of them opens their mouth about anything to do with the government. Shoot them on the spot. Pretty soon, there will be no more talking.
It's time to recognize *where* the ideas for terrorism comes from -- and that's from Islam, in that it's not a religion -- but a *political ideadlogy* that must be *crushed* just like Nazism was crushed during WWII.
Short of crushing the political idealogy of Islam (which means destroying Islam), we are in for a 100-years-war. Get ready for it...
Regards,
Star Traveler
Star Traveler, WE cannot do these things.
Don't you understand? This is real live war. It's not a game. Our country is going to be defeated in a war and it is going to be an utter disaster for us at home and abroad.
We have to change strategy.
What you have suggested: AMERICA goes to war against Islam, all types, in Iraq, is crazy talk. That means everybody kills Americans, and the whole thing falls apart.
The current strategy: hold the enemies apart until they come to their senses, is foolish. They're Islamist radicals. They've been under war and torture for generations. They are never going to come to their senses.
What you need to do is get Islamist Arabs of ONE sort killing Islamist Arabs of ANOTHER sort, destroying Arab unity, destroying pan-Islamic movements, pitting one form of Islam against another, just like Lutherans and Anglicans and Catholics tore Europe to pieces in the 1500s. Net result? The OTTOMANS took over all of the Balkans and North Africa! That's the point. We need to be the Ottomans here.
The Middle East is already a tinderbox over Israel. But puny little Israel has held them off. That anger has become Islamism, and the attacks now come AT US. That's why we're there, to take the fight OVER THERE. If WE do the fighting in this long war of attrition, we're going to lose a lot of people and treasure and get exhausted and fail.
We need to get THEM to fight each other, to exhaustion, thereby depleting the ranks of belligerent males GENERALLY, destroying whatever ideal of Arab brotherhood there is, destroying the ideal of Pan-Islamist unity. There is a civil war in Iraq, and its a proxy for the civil war between factions of Islam everywhere. If the belligerents are killing EACH OTHER, they will not be killing US, and the winners will be so weak and exhausted that we can deal with them. In Iraq, we can make the Kurds and the Shi'ite Arabists DEPENDENT on us for their survival, ESPECIALLY once they have the arms and go on a rampage against their ethnic and religious enemies and do what all of those barbarians all want to do: wholesale slaughter. Once they COMMIT the slaughter, everyone hates them, and they can't hold power after that without our continued support. THEY do the fighting, and we sell them the arms. We go into bivouac and act as the final backstop of the government, and use airpower to wreck the terror supporting infrastructure across the border in Iran. This may well provoke another Iran-Iraq war, and THAT makes Iraq all the more dependent on us.
We NEED to be at war with a whole bunch of these countries, and wreck them so they can't use that oil wealth to wreck us. Iraq is the toehold, but we're going to lose it if we cannot be realistic.
Trying to make barbarians be nice to each other, the current strategy, is childish.
But your idea of AMERICA going on a jihad against Islamists is even worse. Islamists need to be taken out, yes, but it needs to be done by OTHER Islamists, in the context of a civil war which widens into a regional war and tears apart the whole fabric of the civilization in the region. Right NOW, they can sit back inside their borders and use money and arms to fight a proxy war against OUR people in OUR western cities. They need, instead, to be spending that time, money and malicious intelligence feasting on the blood and corpses of their own Arab and Islamist brethren.
THAT will finally break them of the Islamist fetish. Civil war and millions of deaths that bring the whole civilization to ruin. That's what THEY started when they brought down the towers.
Bush talked a good game, but he is shying away, now, from doing the really hard thing and choosing sides. He wants to turn Iraq into Pennsylvania, not be a meanie.
It's going to lose us a war we must not lose.