Just as an aside to one of the earlier posts, one of the benefits of going into Iraq was in denying the Taliban and Al Queda a refuge in another country. Saddam had already taken in many of the people we were after or who had fled the battle in Afghanistan and it is hard to imagine that he wouldn’t have found other ways to be a thorn in our side.
We were able to get more cooperation from Pakistan than I would have thought possible at the outset of the conflict but it appears we may have to set a different course in the future. They are equal parts powerless and disinclined to be much more help than they already are.
A rational person will never be able to understand the appeal of Islam when all it has ever wrought is slavery, suffering and destruction to any land where it has been ascendant. I have said before that if we can figure out what is missing in the hearts and minds of people on the left, or who are adherents of other, similar barbaric death cults not founded by Marx that makes them embrace totalitarianism then we will be well on the way to solving the problem. You see it writ small in such things as trans-fat, dancing or smoking bans and writ large in environmentalism, Islamism or communism but the base desire to control the actions of others when they are no threat to you is a strong one in the human psyche. It is so strong that we will make up entire religions or “scientific” fields of study whose sole purpose is to appease this instinct.
Since no one has cracked this nut yet we have a handy short-hand way of referring to such a propensity… we simply call it “evil”.
The other point that needs to be made is that Pakistan and other cultures where Islam prevails as the animating force are inherently weak ones. The meme needs to be spread that Islamic cultures are what they are… weak, backwards collections of individuals too afraid to stand up to tyranny. Our ancestors were much hardier stock and the culture they built a much stronger one for all of its faults. The entire Islamic world reels from one dictator to the next because they have no foundation to resist when the exemplar of proper behavior they emulate, Mohammed, had no redeeming qualities. This is what makes them weak and what dooms them in the end whenever faced by cultures who have faced down their own petty tyrants in the past and crossed the bridge into modernity.
It is ironic that the cultures who have shed blood and freed themselves are considered weak while the ones who kowtow to every two bit imam and where everyone takes to the streets frothing at the mouth after Friday prayers are considered strong. That doesn’t seem to be a winning argument in my estimation and history seems to bear that out. We do ourselves no favors by pretending otherwise. But more importantly, we do no favors to those living under tyranny by indulging in such pretensions.
