Ayatollah You So The great Shiite hope for freedom in the Muslim world.

WSJ ^ | 4/8/03 | BRENDAN MINITER

[Valin]

"The current al Qaeda leaders are all known now, but the war [in Iraq] is going to create new faces unknown to the rest of the world, and they will become tomorrow's leaders of the groups that will never stop battling America," Cairo-based journalist Mohammed Salah tells the Associated Press.

[Valin]

Flag

[The Red Zone]

That reformation may start with Ayatollah Ali Mohammed Sistani, who issued what may be the first pro-U.S. fatwa in modern Islam last week,

Bears noting

[Valin]

Shiite Schism
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/887186/posts

Kudos to WaveThatFlag

[joesnuffy]

shhhhhh be vehwee vehwee quiet...we is hunting wabbits wahhabis

[Valin]

You know it's not for nothing that our good friends the Saudis were less than thrilled with a war with Iraq.

The fallout from this is going to be very...."interesting"
This is supposing that we don't screw it up.

[Mamzelle]

Saudis are Sunnis, and are known to obstruct Shiites from visiting Mecca and Medina. Since this is required of an able-bodied Muslim, to visit Mecca, it is quite a power that the Saudis have over Dar al Islam.

Best-case scenario--a Shiite counterbalance to the Sunnis. Keep 'em both busy and competitive. Interestingly, women in Islam have it much better in Shi'ia Iraq and Iran than they do anyplace in Islam, except perhaps Turkey. While Iranian women wear a chador (since modified from the full-body veiling), they are allowed education, jobs, and the vote. I'm not sure, but I believe some hold office. How a Muslim country treats its women is an indicator of encouragement.

[Our man in washington]

I don't have a crystal ball. But history teaches us that the way to corral extremism is to react against it strongly.

The reasons are because of three innate tendencies of our species:

1. Lots of young men enjoy war.

2. Few young men enjoy dying for a cause.

3. No society is ever unified on the question of war (or anything else.) A society will have a continuum of people from the most gung-ho warriors to pacifists. These groups will always be in conflict.

Without a strong response from the enemy, the warror element gets the upper hand. Because the risk of death is low, the warrior elements get all the excitement of war with little of the downside. They thus have an incentive to keep the war going as long as possible.

The pacifist element in the society is silenced. The only argument they can give is that "killing is always bad." But humans as a rule don't care about the deaths of people they don't know, so that argument carries little weight.

But if the response from the enemy is strong, the tables get turned. The risk of death starts to outweigh the fun of war, so the warrior element loses all but it's most extreme members. People start listening to the pacifists. People start questioning the mentality of the warrior element.

Events since September 11th seem offer evidence for this model. The rhetoric from the Islamicists has been as strong as ever, but they haven't pulled off any major terrorist attacks in several months.

One possibility is that the organization is no longer getting the "marginal members." These are the people who think that a year fighting in Afghanistan would be fun if risk of death is low, but have no wish to fight if the risk is significant.

If you lose such people, your organization is crippled. Liberals who say that a strong response only "inflames the opposition" fail to understand this point. It only inflames the opposition in the sense that it removes all but the most extremist elements from the opposition. I'd rather face an organization of five extremists than an organization of five extremists and one hundred slightly less extreme people offering support.

Without the support, the extremists are less likely to be successful in their plans. Maybe Al-Qaeda can always find 20 goons psychotic enough to hijack an airplane, but can they always find the hundreds of people necessary to help with the details of recruiting, training, and supplies?

[betty boop]

...theologian Ayatollah Khoi preached a brand of Islam that was compatible with Western political concepts--that it's possible for the individual to tame the devil inside him and live a moral life without coercive societal pressure. Koi argued that a good society is possible only if there is a preponderance of moral people--a bottom-up approach to society that's comparable to the Western political view of individual liberty.... It's no coincidence that Saddam suppressed this religious view.

Great post, Valin. We need to keep our eye on Ayatollah Sistani. He and his clerical associates are key to "winning the peace" for the Iraqi people. Where the late Ayatollah Khomeini (SP?) of Iran asserted the "divine right" of the mullahs to rule society, Ayatollah Sistani has said what while the mullahs are the conscience of the nation, governmental affairs must be conducted by layman politicians. Looks kinda like "separation of church and state" to me.

What Ayahtollah Koi is saying about the foundation of the good society -- that it rests on a preponderance of moral people -- is evocative of Plato. Which does not surprise me at all: Islamic scholarship was the major transmission belt of the Greek classical philosophic tradition during the Western so-called Dark Ages.

[oyez]

But George W. Bush is the Ayatollah of Rock-and-Rollah.

[Destro]

Yea, look how well the Shiite counter balance worked in Lebanon.

[Mamzelle]

I don't propose we behave as idiots--but there might be an advantage to exploit in this tribal competition. We have to start somewhere. I wasn't aware that the bombing of Americans in Lebanon was Shi'ite, BTW...thought it was Arafat's doing, who is Sunni. Mind refreshing?

[Destro]

We went into Lebanon to protect Shiite from Sunni from Christian. The Shiites welcomed us at first and the welcome lasted for about a year. Then the truck bombs.

[Teacher317]

the first pro-U.S. fatwa in modern Islam last week,

But but but but the War on Iraq can't help us on the War on Terrorism!