--- In [email protected], Andreea-Elena Frasie
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>
> Administrator <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> "Armenii sunt dusmanii islamului, ei trebuie nimiciti"
> -am citit povestea lui Krikor si Lusaper Momgian, a lui Noemi, a
celor ce, pentru ca erau "dusmanii Islamului" au fost transformati
in mormane de cadavre...Impresionanta, ingrozitoare, halucinanta.
Sper insa si revelatoare. Revelatoare sper pentru toti pacifistii,
pentru toti domnisorii francezi si "intelectualii" germani,
revelatoare pentru toti cei toleranti cu o doctrina -prefer sa o
numesc doctrina, nu religie -esential intoleranta, violenta si
ucigasa! O doctrina a cuceririi lumii prin masacrarea fara diferente
a tot ce este "pagan" -femei, copii, batrani. Bine spus in titlu:
iata "la ce trebuie sa se astepte crestinii"!
Majoritatea religiilor isi propun sa "cucereasca" lumea. Numai ca nu
ceva metafizic numit "Islamul" a comis genocidul armean, ci entitati
politice identificabile numite junii turci si conducerea Imperiului
Otoman. Descrierea nu este mai revelatoare pentru entitatea de mai
sus mai mult decat ar fi o evocare a colonizarii Americii Centrale
si de Sud pentru catolicism (in general, crestinii din vest au
renuntat la a mai amesteca religia cu politica de-atunci, spre
deosebire de multi activisti din lumea musulmana, din nefericire).
Ce legatura este intre masacrele turcesti si Ben-Laden sau Al-Qaeda,
in afara de utilizarea propagandei religioase in scopuri politice?
Dupa 11 septembrie, nu e religia sau civilizatia musulmana in sine
pun probleme. Acestea nu pot lua parte la raboaie, fiindca sunt
abstractii. Din punct de vedere logic, nu se pot purta conflicte
decat cu entitati si indivizi, care au capacitate de actiune, nu cu
diverse religii, decat metaforic. Adversarii Occidentului (nu numai
ai SUA, vezi atentatul din Madrid) sunt radicalii islamici, a caror
gandire se aseamana, ironic, cu cea a fanaticilor ce tot agita
spectrul amenintarii imigrantilor musulmani (a la Haider, reverendul
Pat Robertson si altii).
Pentru a intelege diferenta, vezi orice dictionar de termeni,
incepand cu DEX-ul, sau de pilda articolul urmator.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=95001493
WHAT'S IN A NAME
World War IV
Let's call this conflict what it is.
BY ELIOT A. COHEN
Tuesday, November 20, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST
Political people often dislike calling things by their names. Truth,
particularly in wartime, is so unpleasant that we drape it in a veil
of evasions, and the right naming of things is far from a simple
task.
Take the matter of this war. It is most assuredly something other
than the "Afghan War," as the press sometimes calls it. After all,
the biggest engagement took place on American soil, and the
administration promises to wage the conflict globally, and not,
primarily, against Afghans.
The "9/11 War," perhaps? But the war began well before Sept. 11, and
its casualties include, at the very least, the dead and wounded in
our embassies in Africa, on the USS Cole and, possibly, in Somalia
and the Khobar Towers. "Osama bin Laden's War"? There are precedents
for this in history (King Philip's War, Pontiac's War, or even The
War of Jenkins' Ear), but the war did not begin with bin Laden and
will not end with his death, which may come sooner than anyone had
anticipated--including, one hopes, the man himself.
A less palatable but more accurate name is World War IV. The Cold
War was World War III, which reminds us that not all global
conflicts entail the movement of multimillion-man armies, or
conventional front lines on a map. The analogy with the Cold War
does, however, suggest some key features of that conflict: that it
is, in fact, global; that it will involve a mixture of violent and
nonviolent efforts; that it will require mobilization of skill,
expertise and resources, if not of vast numbers of soldiers; that it
may go on for a long time; and that it has ideological roots.
Americans still tiptoe around this last fact. The enemy in this war
is not "terrorism"--a distilled essence of evil, conducted by the
real-world equivalents of J. K. Rowling's Lord Voldemort, Tolkien's
Sauron or C. S. Lewis's White Witch--but militant Islam. The enemy
has an ideology, and an hour spent surfing the Web will give the
average citizen at least the kind of insights that he might have
found during World Wars II and III by reading "Mein Kampf" or the
writings of Lenin, Stalin or Mao. Those insights, of course, eluded
those in the West who preferred--understandably, but dangerously--to
define the problem as something more manageable, such as German
resentment about the Versailles Treaty, an exaggerated form of
Russian national interest, or peasant resentment of landlords taken
a bit too far. In the reported words of one survivor of the
Holocaust, when asked what lesson he had taken from his experience
of the 1940s, "If someone tells you that he intends to kill you,
believe him."
Al Qaeda and its many affiliates consist of Muslim fanatics. They
will, no doubt, find almost as many enemies among moderate Muslims
as among infidels, and show them, if anything, less mercy. One hopes
for a wave of revulsion among Muslims who abhor this rendition of
their faith, understand the calamities of all-out war waged to erect
a theocratic dystopia, and will fight these movements with no less
vigor, and no more reservations, than do Christians, Jews, Hindus
and, for that matter, atheists.
Afghanistan constitutes just one front in World War IV, and the
battles there just one campaign. The U.S. is within range of gaining
two important objectives there: smashing al Qaeda (including the
elimination of its leadership), and teaching the lesson that
governments that shelter such organizations will themselves perish.
But what next? Three ideas come to mind.
First, if one front in this war is the contest for free and moderate
governance in the Muslim world, the U.S. should throw its weight
behind pro-Western and anticlerical forces there. The immediate
choice lies before the U.S. government in regard to Iran. We can
either make tactical accommodations with the regime there in return
for modest (or illusory) sharing of intelligence, reduced support
for some terrorist groups and the like, or do everything in our
power to support a civil society that loathes the mullahs and yearns
to overturn their rule. It will be wise, moral and unpopular (among
some of our allies) to choose the latter course. The overthrow of
the first theocratic revolutionary Muslim state and its replacement
by a moderate or secular government, however, would be no less
important a victory in this war than the annihilation of bin Laden.
Second, the U.S. should continue to target regimes that sponsor
terrorism. Iraq is the obvious candidate, having not only helped al
Qaeda, but attacked Americans directly (including an assassination
attempt against the first President Bush) and developed weapons of
mass destruction. Again, American allies will flinch, and the
military may shake its head at the prospect of revisiting the
aborted Gulf War victory, but the costs of failing to do so, and the
opportunities for success, make it good sense. The Iraqi military is
weak, and the consequences of finishing off America's archenemy in
the Arab world would reinforce the awe so badly damaged by a decade
of cruise missiles flung at empty buildings.
Third, the U.S. must mobilize in earnest. The Afghan achievement is
remarkable--within two months to have radically altered the balance
of power there, to have effectively destroyed the Taliban state and
smashed part of the al Qaeda--is testimony to what the American
military and intelligence communities can do when turned on to a
problem. But the Taliban were not the hardest case, and the
airplanes dropping bombs on the enemy in Kunduz and Kandahar are in
some cases older than their pilots, and suffering for lack of spare
parts.
The combination of precision weapons, Special Operations forces, and
sophisticated intelligence-gathering systems indicates the beginning
of a desperately needed "transformation" of the American military.
But this will require something more than the $20 billion a year in
defense spending increases over the budget now in the offing.
Similarly, the creation of a homeland security office without real
powers, the reluctance of the government to open comprehensive,
formal inquiries into the disaster of Sept. 11, and the absence of
big, imaginative programs--mass scholarships for public health
programs, for example, or, more ambitious yet, a really substantial
program of scientific research to emancipate the West from
dependence upon Persian Gulf oil--tell us that Washington is
somewhere between a war footing and business as usual.
It is, of course, early yet, and many of the signs--from the B-52s
pounding Taliban front lines to CIA teams scouring the Afghan hills,
from enhanced spending on vaccines and the Centers for Disease
Control to the creation of military tribunals for foreign terrorists-
-indicate that the government is truly serious. But much remains to
be done, beginning with acknowledging the scope of the task, and
acting accordingly. Yet if after the Afghan campaign ends, the
government lapses into a covert war of intelligence-gathering,
arrests, and the odd explosion in a terrorist training camp, it will
be a sign that it would rather avoid calling things by their true
name.
Mr. Cohen is professor of strategic studies at the Nitze School of
Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.
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