The Battle of Iraq and the Clash of Civilizations
Reader comment on item: Salvaging the Iraq War

Submitted by Roger W. Gardner (United States), Jul 29, 2007 at 16:31

What I am about to say is certain to offend a lot of people, but I'm going to say it anyway. Whether we stay in or Iraq or leave, the war that we have had thrust upon us will continue. For it is not just about Iraq, or Afghanistan, it is not just about al Qaeda. Iraq is just one of the battles in this war. This war is not about what we have done or haven't done in the Middle East.

This war we are in is a war against the hate-driven, fifteenth-century, pride/revenge culture of the Arab world (in which I include Iran) and the violence-prone religion which supports it. This is just the latest attempt of the Arab-Muslim world to fulfill their God-given destiny to conquer the West. Since the seventh century there have been at least a half dozen of these major attacks against the Judeo-Christian West -- some of which came perilously close to succeeding.

Fortunately, their invasions were thwarted and they were driven back across the Mediterranean, where they licked their wounds and plotted revenge and withdrew further into barbarism. Until this backward and hateful culture is thoroughly destroyed or utterly dominated -- as the last vestiges of the brutal warrior code of the Samurai had to be totally destroyed in WWII -- this never-ending war will continue. If there is nothing else that we have learned from our past conflicts with the Arab world, we can be certain of this -- they hate us, they hate our freedoms and they hate our success and they will never give up their attempts to conquer us.

For most Westerners, certainly for most Americans, it is so much easier to believe that what we are dealing with here is a small group of violent fanatics who have "hijacked" a peaceful religion -- like the Nazis "hijacked" Germany -- rather than having to contemplate the awful alternative: that a major world religion could, itself, be violent and that we are, indeed, in the first days of an inevitable and bloody "Clash of Civilizations." I truly wish that it were otherwise, but wishing won't make it so.

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