The Enemy

coalkirk wrote:

stockingfull wrote:

coalkirk wrote:You simply do not understand the enemy we face which is Islam. It forbids them from negoitiating or compromising with their enemy. You'll be singing "Cumbya" right up until the time they kill you.

I didn't say anything about Kumbaya. I said what we've been doing to combat radical Islam isn't working -- to the contrary, it's making the problem worse -- and we have to figure out a better way.

Well I'm open to taking a different strategy. But abruptly pulling out of Iraq and having it spiral in complete chaos and under the control of the nut jobs in Iran can't be phase one. So what is this new strategy? Please enlighten us. Also, please CC the White House, Pentagon and State Department while your at it. I'm sure they would like to hear it.

Let's try Obama's 16 month Plan. Pull all of our combat force out of the civil war in Iraq within 16 months & redeploy alot of them to Afganistan & the rest to a more defenseable position in the Middle East from which we can still attack our real enemies without being such easy targets ourselves. I think it's pretty obvious that we (the US) can't win a civil war in Iraq & that whenever we leave, there will be more Sunni vs Shiite bloodshed in Iraq, so let's save some American lives & taxes & do it sooner rather than later. I still haven't heard a logical argument against at least trying this plan.

coalkirk wrote:

Devil5052 wrote:I haven't had much time to follow this thread over the weekend so excuse me if I have missed some main points but in a quick reading of the posts it seems that we have bogged down in "who" & "why" the enemy is. I am in total agreement with Richard;'s post when he lisetd the horrible litany of muslim fundamentalist crimes against almost all society. The question isn't so much "who" the enemy is but "how" to most effectively fight them. Keeping our overstretched & tired army bogged down & easy targets on the streets of Bagdad seems a totaly ineffective & incredibly costly tactic against our Muslim enemy. We have tried this way for the last 5 years & violence is rising again. Why not try a different tactic?

Good morning Devil,
I'm not so sure we have resolved the "who the enemy is". Politicians are still chanting the "islam is a peaceful religion" mantra. My firm belief is that this is a clash of civilizations. Islam versus everyone else. I don't know how long it will take for this to be generally accepted, maybe not in my life time, but surely in my childrens or grandchildrens life, it will be acknowledged. Luckily for western civilization, I think Stockingfull has a plan. I hope he does anyway. I do know that repeatedly calling Bush names doesn't help the problem. Maybe we could work on that this week and I'd bet the level of rancor will come down.

Morning Coalkirk,
I'm not going to even debate the "Who" is the enemy question as I think it's not even debatable. Richard's list alone provides sufficient proof as to "who" they are, & my opinion is that they cant be negotiated with....they have to be killed! Seems that most of us agree on that point but we sharply disagree on the tactics needed to do the job & my argument is that the tactics of keeping our volunteer army (which is evidently expandable according to D. Cheney) pinned down & targets in an Iraqi civil war , are both ineffective & immoral to our soldiers!

Richard S. wrote:Leaving is only short term solution and in the long run won't solve anything, So we pull out and put all our forces in afganistan, guess what happens? They all move to Iraq... Now 16 months later where are we going to be? Fighting back into Iraq?

I assume you transposed Afganistan & Iraq in your post above......
Maybe you're right, but I doubt it. In either case we could still go back into Iraq if needed. In the mean time, at least for the time that we our out, our forces (not in Afganistan) could rest a bit , re-supply, many American lives could be spaired & we wouldn't be throwing away billions of tax dollars every month. Why not try it?

How about if we try something brand new: stepping away from the ignorant, stereotyped, one-dimensional view of Islam all too prevalent in the West:

http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/WTARC/2007/ss_terror_06_12.asp

Bottom line: they're not all radicals; mainstream Muslims are no more wedded to the nutty language in their scripture than we are to the nutty language in Judeo-Christian scripture. The trick is to "dis-incentivize" the radicals so they're viewed by Muslims as the kooks that they are. Just like most of us view the fundamentalist kooks who think it's OK to shoot a doctor through the kitchen window of his home because he has performed legal abortions.

And Paul, there was neither dynamite nor remote control garage door openers nor cell phones nor the internet in the 18th century. So, unless you can point me to some weapons analysis to the contary, surprise bombings directed at civilian targets were as impossible then as cruise missle strikes -- oh, unless you had access to the "surgical accuracy" of a mortar. No civilians ever slaughtered by those babies. Now, one other minor detail: just in case you didn't know, there weren't that many British civilians in the 18th century colonies, so your challenge to find accounts of "British store bombers" is, to be charitable, both logistically and technologically specious.

And Paul, your argument about the Boston Massacre is just silly. A provocative act by rebels, aimed at eliciting a disproportionate response by the heavy-handed and despised enemy, followed closely by grossly distorted propaganda campaign to whip up support against such enemy. See the pattern? It doesn't matter that John Adams got the British soldiers acquitted; the bad PR fed the appetite of a hungry public long before that. Now, forget the WTC analogy for a second; even on a good day in Iraq, women and children and elderly are inevitably killed by our forces. Lots of them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
And that's on the good days, not a Haditha-days. Oh, and despite those high-altitude feel-good camera shots intended to show us how accurate all them fancy GPS weapons are, we don't get to see the body parts of all the civilians who've been killed "collaterally," as the euphemism goes. But the locals sure do. So, while we're told of how the terrorists use "human shields," the Muslims not only hear about, but constantly see, dead women, children and elderly. High explosives just tend to do that. So, whether it's Dubya's 30,000 civilian deaths or Lancet's 695,000, our conduct of this war easily can be characterized as just as inhumane as almost about any terrorist act you can name. Way more than any count of our gross losses. Let's be clear: I'm not making that characterization but, to draw on one of your comments, Paul, to persist in thinking that there is no evidence on which those who are not sympathetic to us can support their belief that it is we who are the barbarians, is just "delusional."

So let's all ditch the rose-colored glasses and back off the romanticizing of the war we've got our boys fighting over there. The only truly accurate observation ever made on the subject was Wm. T. Sherman's. I'm sure you know it.

According to someone on this forum since BO has not served his country how could he come up with a plan, he has no military experience.

A few BO quotes on Iraq war:

"the United States had an "absolute obligation" to remain in Iraq long enough to make it a success."
"The failure of the Iraqi state would be a disaster,"
It would be a betrayal of the promise that we made to the Iraqi people, and it would be hugely destabilizing from a national security perspective."

Why do you think he went from that to pulling out in 90 days & now, what is it a 16 months? When he made those statements he wasn't running for President. Do you see a pattern here?
IMO they did polling to see how long the troops can stay in Iraq without losing support. I guess after 16 months he would start losing votes.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/artic ... ving_view/

Richard, I didn't cite the article so you could cherry-pick your side out if it and not read the conclusion:

For the time being, while the West is aimlessly exaggerating the "War on Terror" and trying to accommodate Islamism as a social movement that should not be provoked at the least, it is ignoring the root causes of this "War" and is seemingly unwilling to change directions.

We need to start thinking much more creatively -- and less militarily -- about the problem.

Richard S. wrote:So we pull out of Iraq and put all our forces in afganistan, guess what happens? They all move to Iraq...

better?

Sorry, I misread it.

stockingfull wrote:Richard, I didn't cite the article so you could cherry-pick your side out if it and not read the conclusion:

For the time being, while the West is aimlessly exaggerating the "War on Terror" and trying to accommodate Islamism as a social movement that should not be provoked at the least, it is ignoring the root causes of this "War" and is seemingly unwilling to change directions.

We need to start thinking much more creatively -- and less militarily -- about the problem.

Does this guy see the daily threat assessments?

spc wrote:

stockingfull wrote:Richard, I didn't cite the article so you could cherry-pick your side out if it and not read the conclusion:

For the time being, while the West is aimlessly exaggerating the "War on Terror" and trying to accommodate Islamism as a social movement that should not be provoked at the least, it is ignoring the root causes of this "War" and is seemingly unwilling to change directions.

We need to start thinking much more creatively -- and less militarily -- about the problem.

Does this guy see the daily threat assessments?

Do you? And what "threat assessments" are you talking about? Those prepared by the military for the President? If so, those merely measure how many times we've been around the endless loop of this conflict, which misses the whole point of the article.

We're going to have to start thinking outside the box on all this.

Laying all my cards on the table , I admitt to being naturaly biased against Muslims in general as I am Jewish. I can barely watch the Munich Olympic massacre movies without flying into an understandable yet unthinking rage against all Arabs. Of course I realize that not all Muslims/Arabs are murderous villains but almost all the murderous terrorists are, in fact Muslims. Saddam Hussein was a hated man in the Jewish community but, as an American, I still do not feel Iraq was a war we (Americans) needed to fight. That being said, & my admitted biases being disclosed, I try my best to be thoughtful about who oure enemy really is. I cant excuse the overabundance of Muslim/Arab people filling the terrorist/suicide bomber ranks......It isn't coincidence!
I still argue that most of the rancor here relates to how best to confront our common enemy....The Islam-Fascists, Muslim Fundamentalists...whatever label you choose, & staying in the middle of an Iraqi civil war is not a good strategy (IMO) for the reasons I have stated on many posts.

Richard (Devil), nobody's rooting for the radical Muslims. We're debating how best to either combat them directly, which is increasingly difficult, obscenely expensive and arguably counterproductive, or reduce their draw and their number by finding a way to keep their message from resonating.

And one very logical way to do the latter is to get out of their back yard, which is the best recruiting tool we possibly could give them.