Falluja

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salam pax is at dear_raed.blogspot.com

there other links to bloggers in iraq on that page. it all makes rather depressing reading tho.

 

Is it me? Or are all muslim "freedom fighters" cowards? They talk a big game, but when push comes to shove, the best they can do is blow up buses full of civilians, crash planes into buildings full of civilians, and fire rockets from the safety of mosques because they know we'll show respect enough not to blow it to bits.

It takes more courage to come out from the shadows and stand up for what you believe in, than to strap explosives on your body and decimate a cafe in the name of political activism.

They're lucky I'm not running the show over there...Those pansy little cowards would have been playing with their 72 virgins already as their precious mosque/shield came crashing down around them. What the hell, the Mexicans did it to a little church in Texas 168 years ago...We should too!

Screw Iraq. Screw the Middle East. Let's develop an alternative energy source so those jackasses can go back to living in the 8th century like they want.

Whew! That felt good!

 

Something tells me we're all lucky you're not running the show over there.

 

Aldeth, I beleive the plan is to build or occupy thirteen or fourteen military bases in Iraq.

I don't think we ever realy plan to pull out of there.

 

It's you.

I agree with Bill Mahr. It takes a lot of courage to give up your life for a cause you believe in. Whether that cause is justified (in this case, of course, it's not), or whether you think that their fanaticism borders on insanity, is irrelevant. It's still brave. And there's nothing more dangerous than a courageous psychopath.

@Aldeth:

This is the Alley! There's no place for respect here! But I agree with with everything else you said in that paragraph.

 

What is the one in severly outnumbered and outgunned do? Even if their cause may not be admirable in our eyes I wouldnt call them cowards. They attack whatever they can attack and do whatever they can do. Their cause wouldnt gain much if they nicely gathered in one spot with all their arms to be quickly wiped out in one airstrike. If anything I think they are too "brave". If I was an Iraqi resistor I would deploy a sneak, strike and run tactic. Snipe from the shadows at soldiers and run. Look at the terror two men in Virginia managed to cause with just a rifle. Imagine a few thousand people doing stuff like that in Iraq. Lots of small pinpricks and never a target for the US soldiers to attack. Gathering in a mosque seems foolhardily brave to me.

 

Yes, especially since no women are allowed. That would mean spending the afternoon with a bunch of guys who smelled like goats.

My joking aside, it can be said that some of these guys have more guts than brains. The opportunity is there for a political solution, but instead they are giving the Bushies an excuse to linger and to build-up even larger forces in their country.

But I think that the real fear for the terrorist/fundamentalists is the fear of reform. That is what is hidden in my bad joke at the top of my post. Sometimes it's easy to forget that women only got the vote within the last hundred years. And that even in the US there are fundamentalists who think that America went to hell once women and people of color got the right to vote. And as Sir Bel points out, there are those who would like to keep Isalm in the 8th Century.

The need for reform is great in some parts of the Middle East. But even in the US it did not happen all at once. While Jefferson and Washington maintained their plantations with slave labor, while debating the "rights of men," others, such as Ben Franklin and John Adams, were denoucing slavery and debating the need for reform only as far as the politics of the day could take them. It took over another hundred years before reform settled into our own politcal solutions. One can't force this type of reform at the point of a rifle, nor can one stop the progression of reform by blowing himself up. It may be brave but it's not very smart.

 

I think I disagree there. They do not fear reform, they want reform. There is nothing more anti-conservative then fundamentalism of whatever religion. Getting back to the fundamentals requires the abolishment of the existing wrong. Fundamentalism wants to destroy the existing order, not preserve it. And that's what makes them so appealling, the promise of complete reformation and getting rid of the cleptocracies and establish a completly new utopia. Fundamentalism is very modern, even it is claiming to find an ideal world in the past. An ideal world in the past can't be really traced nor re-created, it is pure "science" fiction.

 

Chandos,

I may be misunderstanding your point in your statement of:

I don't really consider the Civil War a "political solution". I realize that the Civil War was in reality about many things, including slavery, but it seems that these issues were in fact settled at the end of a gun, in a war that cost more American lives than the rest of the wars we have fought in combined IIRC.

[ April 09, 2004, 14:21: Message edited by: Taluntain ]

 

Iago - But the reality of the Taliban, and the like, was not a reforming of rights for women. It was just the opposite. And they were allies of Bin Laden. If you believe that the fundamentalist/terrorists who hold themselves up in Mosques are reformists, then we will continue to disagree, because we are viewing reform in two different ways. You are saying that women already have rights in these places, such as the right to vote and be treated as equal citizens, and that fundamentalists are attempting to roll-back such rights, while I am arguing that they don't have such rights to begin with. If I am understanding you properly.

Darkwolf - No need to be confused, because while the larger issue of slavery was settled during the Civil War, the issue of reform was not. That is why blacks had separate water fountains, rest rooms, could hardly vote in most instances, and had the doorways to schools blocked by the likes of George Wallace, in the deep South long after the war ended. The fundamentalists here ran around at night with sheets over their heads and burning crosses.

When I said in my earlier post that Adams and Franklin argued for an end to slavery "as far as the politics of the day" would let them, that is what I was referring to: The presevation of the Union. To have pressed the debate beyond a certain point with the slave states would have meant an end to the union barely before the new nation was established. That was the political fear of the day and why the issue was left unsettled.

Now, the Declaration of Independence declared the "rights of men" with no distinction to race. In fact that all men were equal. Slavery was an obstacle to that reform. The War removed the obstacle as well as establishing the sovereignty of the National government over that of the states, which allowed a political solution to eventually take shape in the way of the Woman's right to vote and the Civil Rights Acts of the 60s. But this could never have occured until the "state's rights" issue could be settled first.

Edit: I did want to add that the confusion was my fault because I "shorthanded" my post. Sorry for that.

[ April 09, 2004, 00:43: Message edited by: Chandos the Red ]

 

Well, no, or yes. I haven't had women rights particularly in my mind. But I think we could agree that reform is changing the way things are to the better, in the case of religious fundamentalism, putting things back in the way they were meant to be according to their interpration. Which in fact, and that's the irony of it, the world never has been as some people make it out to have been.

Which makes fundamentalism anti-conservative in its very nature. Any kind of fundamentalism, christian fundamentalism of course too. They attempt to change the world according to their interpretation of their "fundamental reading sources". Interpretation is always arbitrary. So they want to change the world according to an arbitrary image of the world, a fiction. Only they base their fiction not in the future, they base it on a fictionalised past.

Or one could call it anti-reformation, as at the beginning of the 20th. century, a wave of "Pro-Western" reformation swept of the ME, which its peak and greatest success in Atatürk's Turkey. At the same time, fundamentalism was born and gained pace.

As for women rights and Afghanistan. Indeed, as far as I know, in the early 90ies, women where walking in mini-skirts through Kabul. And Iraq was singled out, as it is one of the most modern countries in the region with a highly trained work-force and a quiet a lot of women with PHD's and in higher positions at work. A result of another failed reformation, as most ME countries have successfully leveled their education systems up on a similar level as Western Countries have in the 60ies. Hoping that would solve their internal problems. Which it didn't. It failed and spawend fundamentalists with brilliant education as surgeons, architects and business adminstrators. Adhering to a very revolutonary and progressive ideology of complete change. In Iran, the didn't re-install something old, they installed something unprecidented and completly new. A modern theocracy. They didn't bring back the tradition, that is the Persian Empire. When they speak about tradition, they speak about their science fiction, but not tradition.

Another problem is, to judge the role of women in other societies. As it's not so simple for our own middle-ages. Women were less, but an aristocratic woman could wield much power in the tribal system called federalism. It's India and the Middle-East that spawned the most powerful women in politics in the last century, only the UK can keep up with Maggie Thatcher.

How many of those fundamental leaders have a first-class education at a British, American or French university. An awful lot. I think the Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who indeed supported the build up of the Taliban as a political tool to gain influence on Afghanistan and settle some border disputes favourably, graduated at Harvard and Oxford. Isn't it ironic.

But tradition doesn't matter, as they are aiming to change the goverments of Algeria, Iraq (succeded), Saudi-Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt and others (remembering that one of the mainheads of Al-Queda now was involved in the assination of Anwar al-Sadat). And then they will try to install their utopic idea of society and goverment. No tradition would then not be questioned and changed if necessary. In Iraq, their racing now for influence.

But on the upside. Those fundamental fictions are complete rubbish and like any other totalitarian regime bound to fail. It's a lesson, in my view, that has to be learned by the folks there. It doesn't work, but it has to be tried out and proven. Then they will go on and try something else, hopefully better. And that's why my bets still are on Iran becoming the first working democracy, yet still not Arab, but at least...

[ April 09, 2004, 01:06: Message edited by: Iago ]

 

Ah, I see your point. The problem here is that it is the religion that is important and not the politics. The politics may allow women to go to college and wear mini-skirts. But the religion forbids such behavior. So, while the countries you cite in the past have been moving forward politically for some time, the religion has been moving in a different direction. In Iran and Pakistan where the religion is more important than the politics, fundamentalism is an anomaly, because they are seeking a religious solution to a political problem. In the West, politics and religion are separate, with their own spheres of influence. But here it is not so hap-hazard, but crafted in the contruction of the systems.

So while in the West we have a system of reform that is liberal in a political sense, it is really conservative in a political sense in the ME. At least I think that is what you are saying.