Upchurch said:
NPR this morning had a piece about the effects of the Iraqi war on Al Queda. I don't remember what was exactly said (I was still waking up), but the gist was that our invasion and occupation of Iraq is fueling muslim hatred of America and there have been massive amounts of recruits to Al Queda. While those in charge of Al Queda pre-9/11 are mostly gone, there are plenty of new members to replace and fill the ranks.
Essentially, we played into the islamic fundamentalists' hands.
I don't really believe this at all.
We need to take a long-term view of the terrorist problem. So first I want to lay out a bit of what I think the problem is. Fascist islam (which is basically what the terrorists believe in) is a delusional belief system. It denies reality. Many in the arab world, and not just the terrorists, subscribe to ideas with absolutely no connection to reality, and they often even seem to claim belief in contradictory things. Here's one example of such a contradiction: belief that the 9/11 attacks were a justified retaliation against the US and belief that it was carried out by the CIA or Mossad and not Islamic terrorists. The terrorists want to start a world war, because they think they can win. They cannot. If they get what they want (a total war between arabs and the west), they will lose, and very badly. It's just like with the Palestinian terrorists: they're constantly trying to escalate the cycle of violence, but if the cycle ever did TRULY spiral out of control, it would be the palestinians, not the Israelis, who would be eradicated. The terrorists deny reality. And they prosper in an environment that also denies reality, where ironies like the arab league (which has no freely elected democratic leaders) criticising the legitimacy of the Iraqi governing council for not being democratically elected happen on a regular basis, where the rest of the arab world was actually shocked that the Iraqi army wouldn't put up more of a fight to defend the man who made Iraq such a miserable place. As long as delusional belief systems dominate (and they extend FAR beyond the terrorists themselves), the terrorists will find it easy to prosper. Now here's a key point: we are already the terrorist's enemy. They can always redirect the frustration of people on the streat against us, regardless of what we do. And as long as oppressive regimes dominate the middle east as they do now, there will always be plenty of problems that can be unfairly blamed on us, and plenty of governments willing to redirect anger properly aimed at them to the nearest available scapegoat. In other words, not only can we not appease the terrorists, but even trying to appease the ordinary arab on the street is not going to solve the problem.
What we need to do is break the delusional belief systems. And invading Iraq was actually part of that. It is waking up parts of the arab world to the fact that their concept of reality was wrong. Iraq did not stand up against our invasion. Saddam was not the hero the rest of the arab world wanted to believe. The Iraqi people are glad to see Saddam go, even if it required a US invasion, and the rest of the arab world is still struggling with reality slapping them in the face on this one. And if we succeed in creating democracy in Iraq, they will also have to face the fact that the only democracy in the region was brought about BY the americans. They may finally begin to wake up to the fact that radical islam holds no solutions to their problems. Our invasion does indeed stir up passions, and may provide a short-term boost to terrorist recruiting. But that's not as important in the long run as waking people up to reality. People operating under rational belief systems do not pilot planes into buildings full of civilians for a cause that cannot be won, even if they hate us. I think waking the arab world to the reality they live in is more important than tiptoeing around their sensibilities in hopes of not rileing the terrorists.
