UK's chances
Reader comment on item: Paul Goodman, MP, Analyses Radical Islam

Submitted by bdoran (Germany), Jan 6, 2007 at 05:44

His analysis and yours are correct; it is Islamism, and not Islam, and the UK has a chance. Unfortunately this argument has no more war-fighting utility than it's Nazi's not Germans, the Japanese war party not all Japanese, etc and we are in fact at war. In fact, these arguments are trivial to the war effort once we disengage from close contact in trying to help the terrorized masses in the Muslim world, which means close combat with the actual guilty bastards trying to destroy both us and the future of the rest of the Muslims.

I know from being in Iraq that many of the civilians will respond to a credible offer of protection from the insurgents, whose GIA-like tactics alienate everyone, forcing all to live in fear. If you don't believe me, believe the AQ in UK tablique fighters who came back from Iraq to UK and voiced exactly that complaint.

Which brings up an opportunity ALL are missing: the very same petty, mindless, lowlife criminal brutality gets them their way often in the short term TURNS ALL against them in the long one, even in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even the conservative Arab tribes, ordinary rural people (like the ones around where I am, Balad...which is rich farmland with Sunni/Shia mix) end up more or less very quickly having had enough with the murderous yet petty nihilism, their criminal behaviors (using KNR of even small children to raise funds, their chief source of raising money internally). No matter how lofty their rhetoric, how theologically valid the fatwas (can you tell I've been reading Scheuer) it falls apart in the eyes of the very people they need to raise as the umma nation, the very fish they need to swim in, the very recruiting base they need. Responding both as part of their manly duties and to their own power base, the sheiks and tribal elders will, and do turn on the erhabi (Iraqi for terrorist) and IF we were only there for them, IF our gutless, groveling abject eunuch Generals would let us be there for the Arabs when they turn, village by village and block by block at those moments WE WOULD begin to win.

And that's why, unless you plan to nuke em all (hah hah hah), we need to re-engage the Iraqi's, and start creating those safe havens for the people who are not so much sick of war, but sick of the petty megleomaniac pyschopaths who are the foot soldiers of jihad.

Of course, I doubt that this opportunity will remain on the table forever. Sooner or later, they will clean up their tactics. And then we will have missed another opportunity, like the Palestinians.

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