Fallujah: Marine Eye-Witness Report

[James A. Donald]

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James A. Donald:
> > Seems to me that permanent civil war in Iraq provides
> > Americans with the same benefits as democracy in Iraq,
> > though considerably more reliably.

Steve Thompson
> You might be more accurate to say that a permanent [civil]
> war in Iraq benefits miltiary leaders and civilian
> contractors with a variety of benefits.

Permanent holy war in Iraq would keep them busy and out of
mischief WITHOUT permanent large involvement from American
military.

Plus, of course, they would be pumping oil like mad in order to
fund it.

Finding Al Quaeda is hard.  Nation building is even harder.
Military training covers nation smashing, not nation building.

But arranging matters so that Al Quaeda is busily killing those 
muslims it deems insufficiently Muslim, and muslims are killing
Al Quaeda right back, seems astonishingly easy.   It is like
throwing a match into a big petrol spill.  Why are American
soldiers getting shot putting out the fire?   Why are Americans
dying to stop arabs from killing arabs? We *want* arabs to kill
arabs.  When arabs kill arabs, we fear that the wrong side
might win - but whichever side wins, it usually turns out to be 
the wrong side.   If no one wins, no problem.

> > Nothing like a long holy war with no clear winner to teach 
> > people the virtues of religious tolerance.  That is, after
> > all, how Europeans learnt that lesson.

> You're dreaming.  People simply do not learn from history.

But we learnt from history.  Europe, and Europeans, did learn
from the European holy wars.

> Many things would be nice if [group A] were busy killing
> [enemy B] instead of [group C].  Sadly, this is not a perfect
> world and the people who need the most killing do not,
> generally speaking, get it.
>
> Perhaps it is a bit of a shame that the kind of broken person
> who ends up becoming a suicide bomber, a Ted Kaczynski, a
> Timothy McVeigh, or even a Jim Sikorski,

First:  Three cheers for Timothy McViegh.

Secondly, the people who organize large scale terror can be 
identified, particularly by locals and coreligionists, which is
why they have been dying in large numbers in Afghanistan.


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         James A. Donald
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