From 2007: I often express my frustration with ungrateful American (as well as British and Canadian) civilians who are anti-War and think we can placate the enemy. I often ask them to at least educate themselves on who the enemy is before they undermine support for our mission. That enemy is Al-Qaeda, primarily, and multiple smaller terrorist groups and cells, most of which have an association with Al-Qaeda but many of which instead have an association with Iran (Hezbollah) or are more independent.
Someone made an interesting point the other day. She said most people simply 'want to go about their daily lives in peace.' She was absolutely right. Most Iraqis and most Afghanis do just want to go about their daily lives and struggles to survive. 90% of the world simply wishes to go about their daily lives of struggling to make ends meet. However, she was 100% wrong in her implication that we were targeting this majority.
In Afghanistan, it may mean spending your nights on a mountain of rock cutting wood. I have no idea where they find this wood because I only found rocks but I know that I heard them all night chopping and cutting their wood. The next morning they and their donkey would make their way down the mountain loaded with wood.
The daily struggle for an Afghani could also mean taking your goats up the mountain the next day to graze. Same mountains full of nothing but rocks as far as I could tell. I don't know how those goats survived but the only thing I could figure was that goats eat rocks.
A point to be made here is that though we may not be able to see what makes something work, doesn't mean that it doesn't work. Even if we don't understand the things that make other people do the things they do, it doesn't mean that it isn't how they think or act. Those Afghanis got that wood from somewhere on the rock filled mountain and their goats were eating something more than rocks. Women like to put that little twist tie on the loaf of bread rather than just spin and tuck the end underneath. Crazy stuff, but not to them. Al-Qaeda terrorists likewise conduct suicide bomb attacks, though it seems like utter stupidity to me.
In the US or Britain, the daily struggle may mean working 40-60 hours a week to pay back those credit cards a little of the money we've borrowed. The same struggle we exert to make ends meet are the same ones the average person in the world exerts. I'm not really sure that we're any richer despite our higher wages. The fact is that someone that owes nothing and has nothing is richer than the one who has $10,000 in assets and $100,000 in debt. The "poor guy" is $90,000 richer. The bum under the bridge has no income but no bills. He has no rent nor mortgage nor utility bills. He can live off the few dollars a day he gets from passersby. I don't want that lifestyle, but he too is living that daily struggle. I'll come back to this on another day.
The honorable US military tries to help those everyday citizens do so. It protects them from violence and helps them along a bit by building schools and hospitals and protecting infrastructure. But our enemy does not. Our enemy kills those muslims because they haven't joined in the jihad. It kills them if they do join in the jihad. It destroys the schools we build because a girl is attending it.
One figure I've seen is that 70,000 civilians have died in Iraq (2007) since the war there began. Many have implied these were killed by our military. They were not. They were killed by our enemy who puts a suicide bomber (or suicide car bomber) in the midst of a wedding or funeral procession, a mosque or a market.
The US Soldier and Marine demonstrate great restraint in targets. They identify their target and shoot only the belligerents. (And don't try to argue otherwise with those few cases that have been in the media about some of our Soldiers and Marines committing atrocities. That is very rare and the US military does not tolerate it. They are tried and punished if found guilty.)
The enemy is willing to kill other muslims. Al-Qaeda has been doing this since we first arrived in Iraq for one primary strategy: to stir up violence and discontent between the Shi'a and the Sunni. They have killed Sunnis and Shi'a though they are a Sunni based sect. Why would they kill Sunni if they too are Sunni? Simple, they wish to get Sunnis to retaliate against the Shi'a and likewise the Shi'a against the Sunni. Their strategy was to create a civil war which they know the American people fear.
Obviously, they've had some great deal of success with this strategy. The Shi'a were slow to retaliate, but when they did, they did so violently. I have to give them credit for the patience they exerted, initially. In more recent days, we have seen an interesting and very hopeful trend though. The Sunnis are getting tired of getting killed by their supposed friends. Many tribal chiefs have recently signed on to rid themselves of Al-Qaeda. (Book Review on the hows and whys they did so.)
"The struggle against the corrupt regimes and the corruptors is in two phases... In the short term, one must take aim at the interests of the Crusaders and Jews," explained Zawahiri in an hour and a half video published on the 4th of July, 2007. "All those who have attacked the (Islamic) nation must pay the price, in our countries and theirs, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Palestine and in Somalia, but above all where one can strike a blow against their interests," he said. Note his inclusion of Somalia. This is certainly not merely in retaliation for our war in Iraq. We left Somalia in 1993.
He goes on to brag that Al-Qaeda is getting close to establishing it's Caliphate. While I do not believe they are close to this goal, I believe they do see light at the end of the tunnel and I should give a little background on this. A Caliphate is the original style of government which ruled islam for it's first several centuries. One could compare it with a Nazi version of the Holy Roman Empire. One could compare it with the style of government exerted by the Ayatollah Khomeni.
Why would he think (or say) they were close to their Caliphate? Simple. The Western press continually publishes calls by our citizens and politicians for a pull out from Iraq. Al-Qaeda leaders are not uneducated and have studied how the results of Viet Nam came about. Their plan is simple: to wait out the (lack of) patience of the western world until they pull out and then to take power, violently, in Iraq.
They are willing to sacrifice tens of thousands of muslims and thousands of their own terrorists to kill a few Americans and break the will of the nation. They saw that it is a strategy that has worked. According to OBL himself, they have a 'love of death.' They claim it is the straightest path to heaven.
A Caliphate is a theocratic empire, ruled by a religious leader using Sharia Law. The early caliphates changed hands by the leaders of islam voting in the new leader after the death of the other guy but this was quickly replaced by assassination of the old leader by the new one. The danger here is not that a religious man would rule a nation but that Wahhabism (the sect of Sunni that runs the internal affairs of Saudi Arabia) and Al-Qaeda have such an extreme view of that religion and wish to rule it that way.
It seems that all in the western world know of the 'evils of the crusades.' It is often quoted as a demonstration of the violence of Christianity. I'm not here to defend the inhumane actions of some of the Crusaders, but I will point out one of those little taught things: the reason for the Crusades. It was the first unity of the nations of Europe, because the Caliphate (then based in Turkey) was overrunning Europe with their conversions by the sword.
European nations had previously attempted to fight off the muslim hordes individually and were seeing nation after nation fall. Romania and Bohemia were the front lines and fought the battle for decades and produced figures like Vlad the Impaler. Regardless of how ruthless he was, he was one of very few to hold the muslims at bay. He fought terror with terror.
So, having seen many failures of Christian nations to withstand the onslaught, the Christian nations (yes, that was the official religion of the countries) banded together and created the Crusades. This brought the spread of islam and the war between these two religions to a stalemate. Slowly, islam was pushed back from France, Spain and other countries of Europe and the Christians were again allowed to practice their religion. Under an islamic caliphate, there can be no other equal religion. The Sabians (monotheistic non-Muslims) are allowed to live, so long as they do so subserviently and pay their extra tax to the Caliphate.
The threat to the US as per the leader of Al-Qaeda in his video released on the 4th of July, 2007, "In the long term one must work seriously to change these corrupt regimes and corruptors," said Zawahiri. This means that he plans to extend his Caliphate here. To do that he says, "one must win over popular sympathy for a change to Islamic Jihadism," emphasising "the necessity of using force to provoke that change." http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070705/wl_afp/usattacksqaedavideo_070705124935;...
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