Text 28921, 257 rader
Skriven 2007-05-27 20:46:11 av Gary Braswell (1:123/789.0)
  Kommentar till text 28789 av Jeff Binkley (1:226/600)
Ärende: WSJ
===========
While this guy has some good points, he seems to lack a sense of direction and
is all over the place.

There has been a lot of published "romanticizing" about the "stability" of the
Cold War world. People either forget or omit a lot.

The main reason terrorists did not hit the USSR is that many were trained,
funded and equipped by Russia in hopes of destabilizing Europe and allowing
more sympathetic communist and radical socialist groups to gain power.

We are relative latecomers to the war on terror with Europe waging one for
decades. While they were hard, weak and vague at alternating times on the
issue, many of their police forces became paramilitary and CTU's popped up all
over Europe after harsh lessons. Arab terror groups were linking up with
European groups to carry out bloody attacks and hijackings.

All with Soviet approval. Its patently obvious you don't bite the hand that
houses, feeds and clothes you...until you mature. With the growing power and
money of Arab oil producing nations, it did not all have to come from Russia.

We in America have a long track record of not having the stomach for fighting
other people's wars. This guy equates OBL being right because of what is
happening in this country dealing with Iraq.

Well, Iraq did not attack us. Terrorists being harbored in Afghanistan did and
us going into Afghanistan caught OBL off guard.

Few if any are calling for our pulling out of Afghanistan. Many are calling for
us to leave Iraq. Is that weakness? I don't think so. Personally, while I was
against going into Iraq in the 1st place, we are there now and have to see this
mess through. But I digress.

While the one incident of terror he mentions against the Russians did take
place and they did respond brutally, the kidnappers acted alone and against all
the terror outfits advice.

But for the all the brutality shown by the Russians over that incident, it
pales to what they did to the Chechen people. Yet these people continued to
carry out heinous attacks on Russian soil. So much for the brutality angle.

I think few would disagree the Russian invasion of Afghanistan is the straw
that broke the camel's back. It put the final nail in the USSR's coffin.
Certainly it contributed to the end of the USSR. I agree with his assessment
that both the West and the East think they brought the bear down.

We stunned the world by taking Afghanistan the way we did. Including OBL and
company.

No weakness there.

Every tyrannical power we have faced has viewed/dismissed us as weak. The weak
sons of Democracy.

Each time they have been proven wrong.

Yet they still think this of us.

Why?

Because we have regard for life, we value freedom, we live by the rule of law
and we are not as brutal as they.

They cannot understand a people such as that will fight and fight hard. We know
that from recovered papers from the insurgents/terrorists.

That is why we have not seen further attacks on our soil. They saw what we did
to Afghanistan and OBL's warriors of heaven. They have a taste, even if they do
not understand.

If Iraq had hit us, there would be none of the current discussion.

And the next group that hits us from abroad, will not have had that taste and
will not realize we will visit war not only upon them, but their homeland as
well.

It makes great political fodder to paint the nation as weak and we are helping
the terrorist by even talking about pulling out of Iraq.

Bull.

We are still killing them.

If that is helping them, well, lets help them some more.

I agree with one thing this guy put forward. Our lack of response to terrorist
incidents over the years, especially the Marine Barracks and the Cole, as well
as our running out of Somalia emboldened OBL.

We can't do that anymore.


Jeff Binkley -> All wrote:
 JB> An excellent article in the WSJ today....

 JB> ========================================

 JB> http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110010080

 JB> AT WAR

 JB> Was Osama Right?
 JB> Islamists always believed the U.S. was weak. Recent political trends
 JB> won't change their view.

 JB> BY BERNARD LEWIS
 JB> Wednesday, May 16, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

 JB> During the Cold War, two things came to be known and generally
 JB> recognized in the Middle East concerning the two rival superpowers. If
 JB> you did anything to annoy the Russians, punishment would be swift and
 JB> dire. If you said or did anything against the Americans, not only would
 JB> there be no punishment; there might even be some possibility of reward,
 JB> as the usual anxious procession of diplomats and politicians,
 JB> journalists and scholars and miscellaneous others came with their usual
 JB> pleading inquiries: "What have we done to offend you? What can we do to
 JB> put it right?"

 JB> A few examples may suffice. During the troubles in Lebanon in the 1970s
 JB> and '80s, there were many attacks on American installations and
 JB> individuals--notably the attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut in
 JB> 1983, followed by a prompt withdrawal, and a whole series of kidnappings
 JB> of Americans, both official and private, as well as of Europeans. There
 JB> was only one attack on Soviet citizens, when one diplomat was killed and
 JB> several others kidnapped. The Soviet response through their local agents
 JB> was swift, and directed against the family of the leader of the
 JB> kidnappers. The kidnapped Russians were promptly released, and after
 JB> that there were no attacks on Soviet citizens or installations
 JB> throughout the period of the Lebanese troubles.





 JB> These different responses evoked different treatment. While American
 JB> policies, institutions and individuals were subject to unremitting
 JB> criticism and sometimes deadly attack, the Soviets were immune. Their
 JB> retention of the vast, largely Muslim colonial empire accumulated by the
 JB> czars in Asia passed unnoticed, as did their propaganda and sometimes
 JB> action against Muslim beliefs and institutions.
 JB> Most remarkable of all was the response of the Arab and other Muslim
 JB> countries to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.
 JB> Washington's handling of the Tehran hostage crisis assured the Soviets
 JB> that they had nothing to fear from the U.S. They already knew that they
 JB> need not worry about the Arab and other Muslim governments. The Soviets
 JB> already ruled--or misruled--half a dozen Muslim countries in Asia,
 JB> without arousing any opposition or criticism. Initially, their decision
 JB> and action to invade and conquer Afghanistan and install a puppet regime
 JB> in Kabul went almost unresisted. After weeks of debate, the U.N. General
 JB> Assembly finally was persuaded to pass a resolution "strongly deploring
 JB> the recent armed intervention in Afghanistan." The words "condemn" and
 JB> "aggression" were not used, and the source of the "intervention" was not
 JB> named. Even this anodyne resolution was too much for some of the Arab
 JB> states. South Yemen voted no; Algeria and Syria abstained; Libya was
 JB> absent; the nonvoting PLO observer to the Assembly even made a speech
 JB> defending the Soviets.

 JB> One might have expected that the recently established Organization of
 JB> the Islamic Conference would take a tougher line. It did not. After a
 JB> month of negotiation and manipulation, the organization finally held a
 JB> meeting in Pakistan to discuss the Afghan question. Two of the Arab
 JB> states, South Yemen and Syria, boycotted the meeting. The representative
 JB> of the PLO, a full member of this organization, was present, but
 JB> abstained from voting on a resolution critical of the Soviet action; the
 JB> Libyan delegate went further, and used this occasion to denounce the
 JB> U.S.

 JB> The Muslim willingness to submit to Soviet authority, though widespread,
 JB> was not unanimous. The Afghan people, who had successfully defied the
 JB> British Empire in its prime, found a way to resist the Soviet invaders.
 JB> An organization known as the Taliban (literally, "the students") began
 JB> to organize resistance and even guerilla warfare against the Soviet
 JB> occupiers and their puppets. For this, they were able to attract some
 JB> support from the Muslim world--some grants of money, and growing numbers
 JB> of volunteers to fight in the Holy War against the infidel conqueror.
 JB> Notable among these was a group led by a Saudi of Yemeni origin called
 JB> Osama bin Laden.

 JB> To accomplish their purpose, they did not disdain to turn to the U.S.
 JB> for help, which they got. In the Muslim perception there has been, since
 JB> the time of the Prophet, an ongoing struggle between the two world
 JB> religions, Christendom and Islam, for the privilege and opportunity to
 JB> bring salvation to the rest of humankind, removing whatever obstacles
 JB> there might be in their path. For a long time, the main enemy was seen,
 JB> with some plausibility, as being the West, and some Muslims were,
 JB> naturally enough, willing to accept what help they could get against
 JB> that enemy. This explains the widespread support in the Arab countries
 JB> and in some other places first for the Third Reich and, after its
 JB> collapse, for the Soviet Union. These were the main enemies of the West,
 JB> and therefore natural allies.

 JB> Now the situation had changed. The more immediate, more dangerous enemy
 JB> was the Soviet Union, already ruling a number of Muslim countries, and
 JB> daily increasing its influence and presence in others. It was therefore
 JB> natural to seek and accept American help. As Osama bin Laden explained,
 JB> in this final phase of the millennial struggle, the world of the
 JB> unbelievers was divided between two superpowers. The first task was to
 JB> deal with the more deadly and more dangerous of the two, the Soviet
 JB> Union. After that, dealing with the pampered and degenerate Americans
 JB> would be easy.

 JB> We in the Western world see the defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union
 JB> as a Western, more specifically an American, victory in the Cold War.
 JB> For Osama bin Laden and his followers, it was a Muslim victory in a
 JB> jihad, and, given the circumstances, this perception does not lack
 JB> plausibility.





 JB>  From the writings and the speeches of Osama bin Laden and his
 JB> colleagues, it is clear that they expected this second task, dealing
 JB> with America, would be comparatively simple and easy. This perception
 JB> was certainly encouraged and so it seemed, confirmed by the American
 JB> response to a whole series of attacks--on the World Trade Center in New
 JB> York and on U.S. troops in Mogadishu in 1993, on the U.S. military
 JB> office in Riyadh in 1995, on the American embassies in Kenya and
 JB> Tanzania in 1998, on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000--all of which evoked
 JB> only angry words, sometimes accompanied by the dispatch of expensive
 JB> missiles to remote and uninhabited places.

 JB> Stage One of the jihad was to drive the infidels from the lands of
 JB> Islam; Stage Two--to bring the war into the enemy camp, and the attacks
 JB> of 9/11 were clearly intended to be the opening salvo of this stage. The
 JB> response to 9/11, so completely out of accord with previous American
 JB> practice, came as a shock, and it is noteworthy that there has been no
 JB> successful attack on American soil since then. The U.S. actions in
 JB> Afghanistan and in Iraq indicated that there had been a major change in
 JB> the U.S., and that some revision of their assessment, and of the
 JB> policies based on that assessment, was necessary.

 JB> More recent developments, and notably the public discourse inside the
 JB> U.S., are persuading increasing numbers of Islamist radicals that their
 JB> first assessment was correct after all, and that they need only to press
 JB> a little harder to achieve final victory. It is not yet clear whether
 JB> they are right or wrong in this view. If they are right, the
 JB> consequences--both for Islam and for America--will be deep, wide and
 JB> lasting.

 JB> Mr. Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton, is the author, most
 JB> recently, of "From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East"
 JB> (Oxford University Press, 2004).


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 JB>  * Origin:  (1:226/600)


-- 
"We are safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the
night to visit violence on those who would do us harm."- George Orwell

"For those dreams taken, here are a few nightmares."
Written on a bomb dropped on Tora Bora.

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