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.
You said -- "Star Traveler, WE cannot do these things."
And that's why we're going to get a perpetual and 100-years-war. It *will not* go away -- period, no matter what happens in Iraq or how great our success there. Iraq is not the answer, it is only the symptom.
You also said -- "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."
I understand that war is brutal and you kill your enemies and you destroy their government and you take over their country. You don't make "nicey-nicey" comments about how "sanitary" a hanging was (or was not). You don't worry about whether you dusted up someone's Koran, you don't worry about someone feeling depressed that they're in a dank dark prison and somone had some dogs barking at them...
The majority faction over in Iraq is supported by Iran. Iran is out to get us. They pretty much already control the government over there in Iraq and will only have to wait until we leave (if they were smarter, they would make it *real quiet* in a hurry and we would leave the day after tomorrow...). And when we leave, then Iran has Iraq, too -- another Islamic country to perpetuate their Islamic rule over the world, as they believe they're destined to do. Now, it's Iraq and Iran and Syria and Afghanistan and Pakistan -- after the U.S. has pulled out of the region. Then we have a worse war on our hands and then we *really get hit* this time around -- big time -- worse than before. And all because we didn't want to get nasty on the first round....
Regards,
Star Traveler
P.S. -- I hope everyone is getting ready for this ongoing 100-years-war, which is going to be happening regardless of what we do in Iraq and no matter how successful anyone wants to make it out to be.