What do you think?

[incarcerated]

Originally Posted by Triman19

Pakistan’s Brigadier General Bashir Baz to Greg Mortenson (2003): “You have to attack the source of your enemy’s strength. In America’s case, that’s not Osama or Saddam or anyone else. The enemy is ignorance. The only way to defeat it is to build relationships with these people, to draw them into the modern world with education and business. Otherwise the fight will go on forever.”

Baz is essentially saying the same thing that made Thomas Peter M. Barnett a celebrity, and a good deal of money (“The Pentagon’s New Map”). (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3xlb6_0OEs)
Radical Islam is in Barnett’s “Gap” i.e. that portion of the world that is archaic, backwards, and resists participation in the modern world and the global economy (except to grow poppies or engage in human trafficking).
The notion is that we need “to draw them into the modern world with education and business.” The answer to the conflict if Inclusion.

I, for one, am not a big Thomas Peter M. Barnett fan. Too many names, for one thing.

Like Barnett, Baz tends to minimize (or ignore) the fact that a nation’s participation in the modern world/global economy does not mean that said nation is not in competition with or hostile towards the West. Iran provides an example of a nation that is reasonably well connected to the modern world economy, with “education and business,” but is an Islamic theocracy. Its connection with the rest of the world in no way precludes conflict.

Baz also assumes that Fundamentalist Islam is amenable to inclusion, when the opposite is the case. Radical Islam is petrified of Western influence. Our media and entertainment (music and movies) are an abomination to them, a corrupting influence. We are unclean infidels. The Islamic Fundamentalists who planned and attacked the World Trade Center believed that they were defending the Muslim family, fighting to protect Islamic traditions. Their war is against Western encroachment and Western influence.

BTW, what's the class?

[ZonieDiver]

What is a spatula war? I don't understand the reference.

Nor did I. Perhaps this is what he is talking about...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqo-K8C3TdU

[99meters]

Originally Posted by head

What do you think about the soldiers I fight along side who are muslim/wiccan/buddhist or atheist? Are they part of the darkness?

Yes. Until you are able to convert them.
I look at christianity and islam more so as cultures than as religions ( the sum total of ways of living built up by a qroup of humans beings and transmitted from one generation to another: webster).
America has christian culture in practice (freedom of choice is the backbone of christianity and America). So if you are a wiccan, buddhist or atheist and you are fighting for this country... you are fighting for christian culture.

[Richard]

Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.

- Robert A. Wilson

Richard's $.02