they got al-zarqawi

[mburbank]

I'm not all that clear on what motivated the Oklahoma city bombing.

What exactly do you think is different about the Crusades, Kev? Or the Inquisition? Do you believe Western nations have evolved beyond that sort of atrocity for those sorts of reasons? Although I would disagree that would certainly be an arguable position.

Do you think that past genocides and holy wars are irrelevant to the current situation because they aren't happening now and this is? Again, defensible, but I would say the past might be instructive and serves as a decent shield against arogance and superiority, two forces strong in our current foreign policy and not entirely unrelated to the predicament our soldiers are currently in. You go to war with the administration you have.

We actively encouraged and empowered Islamic fundamentalism in a few global hotspots during. Perhaps encouraging religous fundamentalism is a bad idea an we might think about not encouraging it in the future. It may be that encouraging and empowering religous zealots could be counterproductive even if, and this is highly speculative, they are not Muslims.

I'm not saying that we aren't currently fighting Islamic extremism. I'm saying I think we are fighting it blindly, poorly, and in a way which entrenches and supports our enemy, and that this is largely due to arrogance. I don't think it would hurt to remeber that we have not been holier than thou for very long in the march of history and there are no guaranties we will remain holier than thou.

Why does the most extreme for of the Muslim religion currently wield so much power? This is the problem we face right now. I don't think any amount of bombs will change the equation. I'm not convinced that we are doing anything that adresses the question. Here are to schools of rhetoric about what we are doing in Iraq, and I believe neither one.

1.) We are there to control their oil.

2.) We are there to bring Democracy.

I believe we went there for muddy, undefined, multiple and in some cases mutually exclussive reasons. This may have something to do with how muddy, undefined, multiple and sometimes mutually exclussive the results have been.

I think one thread that brought us to the moment we are now in (just one among many, don't get nutty on me) is that we are of God and they are not. Amidst the many reasons we went to war, I think in there, to some degree, far less crazy than what it takes to behead someone, it helped that W is (by his own description) a fundamentalist.

I'm not saying that we brought this on ourselves. Far, far, far, from it. But I think there is a strong cultural tendency to think America has never done anything bad, and if we did do anything bad like say, slavery, or killing all the Indians or putting the Japanese in camps, that's history and it will never happen again and we sure as hell don't do anything like that today and any claims that we do like the School of the Americas or overthrowing elected Democracies or White Phosphorus or torture is just trumped up bullshit or a few bad apples. And if, by some bizarre circumstance we ever did do anything bad, it couldn't have contributed to the bad things that are happening now.