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So it is not a religious war?

I sure hope it isn't [a religious war]. That would be sooo....Middle Ages. Prez Bush is absolutely right not to go down that path, and should indeed take great pains to at least make the attempt to convince the world that he isn't. But unfortunately a large percentage of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims don't see the situation quite that rationally, and I'm quite sure that our President's assurances fall mostly on deaf ears.

This Is A Religious War
October 7, 2001

By ANDREW SULLIVAN

NY Times

Perhaps the most admirable part of the response to the conflict that began on Sept. 11 has been a general reluctance to call it a religious war. Officials and commentators have rightly stressed that this is not a battle between the Muslim world and the West, that the murderers are not representative of Islam. President Bush went to the Islamic Center in Washington to reinforce the point. At prayer meetings across the United States and throughout the world, Muslim leaders have been included alongside Christians, Jews and Buddhists.

The only problem with this otherwise laudable effort is that it doesn't hold up under inspection. The religious dimension of this conflict is central to its meaning. The words of Osama bin Laden are saturated with religious argument and theological language. Whatever else the Taliban regime is in Afghanistan, it is fanatically religious. Although some Muslim leaders have criticized the terrorists, and even Saudi Arabia's rulers have distanced themselves from the militants, other Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere have not denounced these acts, have been conspicuously silent or have indeed celebrated them. The terrorists' strain of Islam is clearly not shared by most Muslims and is deeply unrepresentative of Islam's glorious, civilized and peaceful past. But it surely represents a part of Islam -- a radical, fundamentalist part -- that simply cannot be ignored or denied.

In that sense, this surely is a religious war -- but not of Islam versus Christianity and Judaism. Rather, it is a war of fundamentalism against faiths of all kinds that are at peace with freedom and modernity. This war even has far gentler echoes in America's own religious conflicts -- between newer, more virulent strands of Christian fundamentalism and mainstream Protestantism and Catholicism. These conflicts have ancient roots, but they seem to be gaining new force as modernity spreads and deepens. They are our new wars of religion -- and their victims are in all likelihood going to mount with each passing year.

It's about oil, and about Israel. If it weren't for those two factors we wouldn't give a damn about what went on in the middle east, and they wouldn't give a damn about us.------ So it is not a religious war?

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There are two entirely different facets of this. Most certainly we would not have been defending the Saudis against outside forces except that our automobiles would run dry. Invasions of other nations take place every day. You don't see us intervening in the slaughter in Africa or that took place for ten years between Iran and Iraq that killed off half the men in a generation on both sides.

Much of it is a religious war for them. They consider our support for Israel a personal religious insult worthy of retaliation. Superimposed upon this is also what has been seen in Nigeria, Indonesia, and the Phillipines.