Iraq Civil War

[Yahoshua]

Post your vote...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060803/ap_on_go_co/us_iraq_20;_ylt=Ar9zx5jAbmaTsxqGZxGU3TNX6GMA;_ylu= X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl

[Linton]

I am only surprised it has taken these two eminent men so long to notice!

[snowsub]

Personaly I wish the Iraqi government would show abit more backbone and start dismantling the different factions, taking Moqtada Al-sada out first would be a good start, then the medi army would start to dis-intergrate.
And make it illegal for civi's to have guns, it was that way before and it'd help with the rampaging gangs, any un-uniformed person with a guns will be shot on site.

And put loads of pressure on the sunni's to reign in the groups still pissed off at loosing power.
Obviously the Al-queda faction will be the hardest and I'd be more tampted to deal with them last, the rival shi'ite @ Sunni militia should be the starting point. (And not for the US & Coallision, it's the Iraqi governments job.)

[waste gate]

I'm wondering why the Kurds don't seem to have major problems in the north.
Are we not hearing of it, or is there some other reason?

Is the sectarian stuff we see in thee south based on centuries of disagreement?

[Ducimus]

Is the sectarian stuff we see in thee south based on centuries of disagreement?


Yeah, you could say that. :roll:

[Yahoshua]

We don't hear anything up north because the Kurds are all armed!! (And making guerilla attacks into Eastern Turkey from what I gather...NOT an intelligent move on their part).

[scandium]

I am only surprised it has taken these two eminent men so long to notice!

They kind of have to grudgingly admit it now with the fall house/senate elections coming up, and with Bush's popularity and support for the war both in the toilet. Fortunately for them the world is a little distracted right now by events in Lebanon, but that can't last more than a couple more weeks before people lose interest in this sideshow (in fact I think most already are starting to)...

[Ducimus]

General's deal more with poltiics then any soldier would want. To speak out, or to otherwise voice an opinion that would be contrary to the good of the secretary of defense, is kinda like playing russian roulette with their career.

[P_Funk]

General's deal more with poltiics then any soldier would want. To speak out, or to otherwise voice an opinion that would be contrary to the good of the secretary of defense, is kinda like playing russian roulette with their career.

They probably smell the stink of death on the Bush administration and are trying to preserve their careers so that a few years from now they can say that the mess in Iraq wasn't their fault. "Look, see? I warned them!"

[waste gate]

There are two types of general officers. Combat generals, the likes of Franks, Schwartzkopf, Sherman, Rommel, Pattton, Doneotz and others. And political generals, Eisenhower, Montomery, McArthur, Georhing, Degaul.

[scandium]

General's deal more with poltiics then any soldier would want. To speak out, or to otherwise voice an opinion that would be contrary to the good of the secretary of defense, is kinda like playing russian roulette with their career.

Right, which is why I doubt these guys are saying this without at least a nod of indifference from the Sec. Def, if not some encouragement (thereby they can float the trial balloon with Rumsfeld and Bush both maintaing the deniability option).

[Ducimus]

The key difference with this event i think,. ... i mean.. unless im mistaken, is that the generals were asked their assesment from a senate committee. Rather then voluntarly give one when it wasn't asked. Which kind of harkens back to the "rebellion" against Rumesfield. ( http://www.slate.com/id/2139777/ )

Going back on topic of Civil war. I honestly haven't seen many headlines in sectarian violence lately. That doesnt mean it's not happening, or escalating, only that I (we) havent been hearing more about it. But i know for a fact, that the situation in any given theater is generally COMPLETELY DIFFERENT then the picture painted by the media, for better, or even worse. So while we're not hearing much about it, its quite likely its spiralling out of control, hence the General Officer comments.

Now, what i find intresting in this, should a state of civil war be offically declaired or recognized, is what our (the US's) reaction to it will be. Right now, without any civil war, i can sit here, and look anyone in the eye if i had to, and tell you straight up, we're not leaving Iraq anytime soon. We've already built up our bases, and poured more concrete there then we did in vietnam.

Iraq will be, once things settle down, what is called an "oversea's remote short tour". In otherwords, i see us in Iraq for the next decade or two, rotating troops every 365 days, just like Korea. Only difference is, there wont be any DMZ to sit behind.

Now while im 100% sure that's what will happen, regardless of any poltiics back home about pulling out of iraq, i think all that becomes questionable should we ever acknowledge an iraqi civil war. It could give us an opportunity to depart/pullback in such a way as to save face (something which we currently do not have), OR it could get us mired into an even deeper morass.

[TteFAboB]

Iraq will stabilize in 30-years time or turn into a Xiite wasteland "tomorrow", depending on the plan. Such stabilization doesn't mean necessarily the existence of the state of Iraq. Balkanizing is a last resort option, divide and conquer.

In the event of a fully-fledged Civil War, the US can support one side or if no side wants support just pull out, wait for one side to bleed the other and return once half the insurgent manpower is dead.

[Yahoshua]

I don't see us leaving Iraq....ever.

There's too much to gain by staying, and far more to lose by leaving. We're tied down there whether we like it or not.

I already see Iraq in civil war (sectarian violence). It may be sporadic, but it is a war nonetheless. Once the Iraqi govt. can stand on their own and provide their own army, I can see the bulk of U.S. troops leaving Iraq, and having at least 3 permanent U.S. bases in Iraq. North, Central, and South. This way we have a presence in any given area but not so noticeable as to draw the ire of the population in a moments' notice.

[August]

They probably smell the stink of death on the Bush administration and are trying to preserve their careers so that a few years from now they can say that the mess in Iraq wasn't their fault. "Look, see? I warned them!"

The "stink of death" started when Bush was elected to his second and final term in office. Its that's happened to all 2nd term Presidents, regardless of party, since FDR. Since they can't run again they gradually loose influence as it winds down. You Canadians can keep a guy in office forever theoretically i guess, but an American president has at most 8 years in office. The 2nd four of which he has an ever more tougher time pushing his agenda.

[August]

There may be a civil war in Iraq, maybe not, maybe something in between. Regardless of our wishes, ultimately that is the choice of the Iraqi people. It is, after all, their country.

We've removed their biggest impediment to their ability for self determination, the entrenched dictatorship of Saddam and his Baathists, but at some point the Iraqi people will have to stand on their own.

[scandium]

I don't see us leaving Iraq....ever.

There's too much to gain by staying Like what? Profits for the multi-nationals doing "reconstruction" projects there that the Iraqis keep blowing up? More flag-draped coffins coming home in the dead of night that you're not permitted to see on TV? More guys coming home with PTSD and other combat-related mental illnesses that have resulted, in some cases, with these guys shooting themselves and/or their families? More guys coming home with missing limbs and other disfiguration from IEDs to further burden your already underfunded VA?

and far more to lose by leaving. Such as the $8 billion/month that its adding to the national mortgage? Or the positive effects its having on recruitment efforts where people are lining up to get shipped off to Iraq to be used as cannon fodder for Halliburton and Friends? Or maybe you have in mind the vast oil wealth and cheap gas that would be lost which is why the price of oil has just about doubled since 2002? Or maybe your one of the few who still cling to the notion it could be a model democracy in the ME just like the one Israel is destroying in Lebanon right now which will encourage the Syrians, who are calling up reserves, and the Iranians, who have since Iraq stepped up their nuclear ambitions, to become pro-U.S. Jeffersonian democracies like Iraq was to become, and just like the government the Palestinians recently elected... err oops, no that was Hamas -- my bad.

We're tied down there whether we like it or not. Tied down? That's not the metaphor I would choose.

I already see Iraq in civil war (sectarian violence). It may be sporadic, but it is a war nonetheless. Really? There goes the Rumsfeld doctrine of "Shock and Awe" as a means of pacification -- too bad the Israelis are again repeating the same mistake in Lebanon, and like all lunatics, are hoping that if they can just do the same thing over and over often enough they'll get a different result.

Once the Iraqi govt. can stand on their own and provide their own army, Are we living on the same planet? The Iraqis already have an army, several armies in fact and all composed of elements from the one that Medal of Freedom winner L. Paul Bremer dismantled; there's the tiny official army that is all but helpless and that nobody, least of all the Americans, trust; and then there are the guerrilla armies killing each other and any American they can who steps outside the Green Zone fortress.

I can see the bulk of U.S. troops leaving Iraq, and having at least 3 permanent U.S. bases in Iraq. North, Central, and South. This way we have a presence in any given area but not so noticeable as to draw the ire of the population in a moments' notice. Well there will almost certainly be one, though they're calling the 21 structure $600 million complex an "embassy" (complete with its own independent power plant and water treatment plant)... kind of a city within a city, or, a giant bull's eye depending on your perspective (my prediction is that after the U.S. or Israel bombs Iran this "embassy" will be the first thing the Iranians level in retaliation -- think Marine barracks bombing circa 1982 redux).

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2006-04-19-us-embassy_x.htm

Not that I really care by the way, being Canadian and all, outside of the fact that it makes me very grateful we had Chretien in office and not Harper when your government invited us to participate in this little adventure (which according to Rumsfeld would take only '6 days, 6 weeks, I doubt 6 months').

[STEED]

These people only understand one thing being under the rule of a dictator. Why are we trying to impose western style democracy on them? They just don't understand it and don't want it and our troops are stuck in the middle while are politicians fart around looking good.

[Skybird]

As I already have said over one year ago, I regard the road to civil war already as a phase of civil war itself.

When dozens, sometimes even one or two hundreds, get killed by sectarian violence since years, you already HAVE a state of civil war.

It will boil on at low to medium intensity for years to come. 2003 had been a year of totally false and foolish decisions, and it already has started to fire back on the West. Iran since months is openly battling and shelling the Kurds in Northern Iraq (I wonder why Western medias take so little note of that). Turkey is eager to open battle against the Kurds, and get it's share of oil at Kirkuk. The central government is weak, the security apparatus is infiltrated, secret police and death squadrons of the government use violence and torture of the same and even worst kind than they did under Saddam, organised crime is omnipresent, and administrative structures are plagued by corruption. the leading power there is Iran now, and sooner or later their Iraqi representatives will openly claim power.

Poisoned seed brought out on infertile soil, in the midst of winter. Go figure about what harvest you can expect. Impossible that something good and bright can come from this. Bush's folly has achieved the exact opposite of what they wanted to achieve. As predicted.

[Yahoshua]

http://www.break.com/index/what_really_happens_pallywood.html

[Iceman]

http://www.break.com/index/what_really_happens_pallywood.html

:up: Pallywood...Crazy.

[Skybird]

http://www.break.com/index/what_really_happens_pallywood.html
The above is about the How. The following is about the Why.

Welcome to theater of jihad absurd

by Michelle Malkin

Welcome to the marquee performance of "Qana: The Fraud and the Furious," brought to you by the Acting Guild of the Religion of Perpetual Outrage.

The drama unfolded over last weekend with mob scenes across the Muslim world, ostensibly -- ostensibly -- in response to civilian deaths in Qana, Lebanon. Angry Muslims from Beirut to Gaza to Lahore set fire to American and Israeli flags. They burned effigies of Western leaders. They raised their voices in chants of "Death to America" and "Death to Israel."
The nervous nellies sitting in the world's balcony seats exclaimed that the tragedy in Qana will make the Muslims hate us more. But if the uproar over the accident in Qana -- an Israeli exception to the Hezbollah rule -- sounds like a tired old re-run to you, well, it is.
This ongoing production utilizes the same talented field of Jew-haters and West-haters and flag-burners and machete-wielders who brought you worldwide months of manufactured rage over the Mohammed cartoons, crazed riots in Nigeria over the Miss World pageant, sharia-approved murders in Somalia of World Cup soccer fans, the fictional Jenin "massacre," the fable of Mohammed al-Dura, and ululating protests over the corrupting influences of "The Satanic Verses," Theo van Gogh, Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's, the sacrilegious Burger King ice-cream swirl, Valentine's Day and Piglet from "Winnie the Pooh."
The truth about Muslim outrage over Qana is that it's not really about the tragic deaths at Qana -- just like the Mohammed cartoon jihad was not really about the cartoons. It's a pretext for much grander goals to defeat the infidels -- be they Israeli, Danish, Dutch or American.
Remember: Muslim riots over the Mohammed cartoons printed by the Danish Jyllands-Posten newspaper last fall were manufactured amid attempts to bully Denmark over the International Atomic Energy Agency's decision to report Iran to the United Nations Security Council for continuing with its nuclear research program. Iran blamed Israel for the cartoons in a speech marking the 27th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution.
Now, the Qana jihad, gleefully stoked by Iran, is unfolding amid mounting U.N. Security Council pressure on Tehran to suspend its nuclear program. What better way to distract from Hezbollah's atrocities and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's annihilate-the-Jews plans than to start screaming about Israel's "war crimes" and Western crimes against humanity?
As we watch Hezbollah's horrible parade of dead children in Qana replay endlessly on television, here is a suggestion for all the intrepid American journalists gallivanting with Hezbollah's handlers in the region: Perhaps you could put down the figurative hookah pipes, take off your sympathy hajibs and find out the identity of the green-helmeted guy holding up baby corpses in Qana as props for your sensational, page-one pictures.
Is he just an ordinary bystander? A rescuer who just happened to be in the same place 10 years ago, traipsing around with dead children's bodies to exploit an accidental Israeli bombing prompted by terrorists hiding behind civilians? A civilian volunteer or a propaganda producer?
To his credit, MSNBC reporter Richard Engel picked up on a question the blogosphere has been asking since the toddler corpse-paraders in Qana took center stage: Where were all the men? His reporting underscores Hezbollah's evil m.o. -- embedding themselves in civilian populations to force exactly the kind of tragic error from Israel that appears to have occurred at Qana.
"[W]e went house to house in trying to figure out where all the young men were. It seems that some of them were fighters, some of them were Hezbollah members that were out -- this according to Hezbollah people who didn't want to be interviewed but we convinced them to talk to us."
To the photographer-stenographers who were herded to the scene eight hours after the strike, why is it that the bodies of the children were already in a state of rigor mortis? How to explain the sparkling clean pacifier clipped onto a dust-covered toddler carried around by the friendly corpse-parader? And why were the women and children kept in the building for so long? Questions abound. Answers are as scarce as men in that Qana building.
"All the world's a stage," Shakespeare wrote. The journalists of our age have chosen their costumes: court jesters in the Theater of Jihad.
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060805/OPINION03/608050307/1372

[Takeda Shingen]

I think that many of us are squabbling about symptoms, not the disease. Iraq will stabilize. It will do so with or without foreign intervention. It may take five years, ten years or thirty years, but it will happen. What Iraq will become when stabilized is the real issue. The odds against an Islamist regime are long, especially since Iran is only next door, and can afford to bide it's time indefinitely.

[Bertgang]

At civil war now, or at least in a really similar condition: to use or not such definition is mainly a political choice.

As Takeda Shingen said, the real problem will be the final outcome.

[tycho102]

There is no Iraq. There is no Iraq. There is no Iraq.

There is no Iran. There is no Saudia Arabia. There is no Oman. There is no Qatar. There is no United Arab Emirates. There is no Egypt. There is no Morrocco. There is no Chad. There is no Algeria. There is no Libya. There is no Tunisia.

There are Sunni. There are Sufi. There are Shi'a. There are Wahhabi (Salafi).

Liberal westerners (read: Godless Heathens) refuse to accept religion as a point of uncompromising difference. As a consequence, only internationally-recognized nationality can seperate people. Only the UN can seperate people; not religion, not tribes, not dialects. This is where the problem starts -- with liberals who see all religions as being the same, because all the religions condemn their lifestyle just the same. The problem starts when people exclusively define the world between nations, and there is no possibility of tribal or religious difference.

Sunnis hate Shi'a. They've been hating Shi'a since Muhammed died and left his nephews and generals to decide who gets to reign over everyone else in the religion. This "civil war" is nearly 1400 years old. If you look up civil war, the definition is "conflict within an organization". This is only partially accurate for Islam, because each sect sees itself as the only version of Islam, and all others are apostates. The Wahhabi consider Sunni to be apostates. The Shi'a consider Sunni to be apostates. The Sunni consider Sufi to be apostates. In this manner, if you consider "Islam" to be one religion, then yes; it's a "civil war".

If you need some kind of analogy, here is it. The Anabaptists condsider Lutherans to be apostates. The Mormons consider Episcopalians to be apostates. The Quakers consider Greek Orthadox to be apostates. And all of these people want the other sects (read: Sons of Pigs and Apes) dead. They want their families dead. They want their houses burned to the ground. They want to go in there in the middle of the night and piss on their ashes.
Yes. It's just like 1928 Chicago "prohibition" gangs. With guns and rice paddies and pushing Charlie back to the Great Wall of China. It's Sam Kineson with a suicide belt. It's completely crazy. And it's been crazy and out of control for 1400 years. The Ottoman Empire was the best damn thing for Islam that could have ever been because it trampled all the Muslims the exact same -- the only problem is that they were supporting the Germans in WWI.

So. Islam has been in a "civil war" for 1400 years. The problem is Henry Ford used mass-production to make the Model-A, and the entire rest of the world has been using internal combustion engines ever since then. The problem is that, through a freak of nature and geography, Islam has been bolstered by the resource of oil. This has fueled their ability to buy technology which they otherwise could not have developed on their own. This is the artifical support with which their religion has "flourished" with for 100 years, giving some tribes an advantage over the others. "Iraq" isn't isn't in a new "civil war" since 2003. It's been in a "civil war" since 640AD (Current Era [CE] for you Godless Heathens). It's just that the Sunni have been using every barbaric tactic known to the Great Khan to keep their power over the Shi'a, not just in Iraq, but Qatar and Oman and the UAE, too.

The problem is that if we pull out of Iraq, Iran will bolster the Shi'a to litterly wipe out the Sunni. And then the Iraq Shi'a and the Iranian Shi'a will join forces. This will put a serious pressure on the Wahhabi in Saudia Arabia, and the Saudis know this.


It is the most horribly complex set of allegiances and sectarian strife that I've ever seen, even in comparison to South American drug cartels or African tribes. Or packs of wolves and heina.

[Takeda Shingen]

There is no Iraq. There is no Iraq. There is no Iraq.

There is no Iran. There is no Saudia Arabia. There is no Oman. There is no Qatar. There is no United Arab Emirates. There is no Egypt. There is no Morrocco. There is no Chad. There is no Algeria. There is no Libya. There is no Tunisia.

There are Sunni. There are Sufi. There are Shi'a. There are Wahhabi (Salafi).

Liberal westerners (read: Godless Heathens) refuse to accept religion as a point of uncompromising difference. As a consequence, only internationally-recognized nationality can seperate people. Only the UN can seperate people; not religion, not tribes, not dialects. This is where the problem starts -- with liberals who see all religions as being the same, because all the religions condemn their lifestyle just the same. The problem starts when people exclusively define the world between nations, and there is no possibility of tribal or religious difference.

Sunnis hate Shi'a. They've been hating Shi'a since Muhammed died and left his nephews and generals to decide who gets to reign over everyone else in the religion. This "civil war" is nearly 1400 years old. If you look up civil war, the definition is "conflict within an organization". This is only partially accurate for Islam, because each sect sees itself as the only version of Islam, and all others are apostates. The Wahhabi consider Sunni to be apostates. The Shi'a consider Sunni to be apostates. The Sunni consider Sufi to be apostates. In this manner, if you consider "Islam" to be one religion, then yes; it's a "civil war".

If you need some kind of analogy, here is it. The Anabaptists condsider Lutherans to be apostates. The Mormons consider Episcopalians to be apostates. The Quakers consider Greek Orthadox to be apostates. And all of these people want the other sects (read: Sons of Pigs and Apes) dead. They want their families dead. They want their houses burned to the ground. They want to go in there in the middle of the night and piss on their ashes.
Yes. It's just like 1928 Chicago "prohibition" gangs. With guns and rice paddies and pushing Charlie back to the Great Wall of China. It's Sam Kineson with a suicide belt. It's completely crazy. And it's been crazy and out of control for 1400 years. The Ottoman Empire was the best damn thing for Islam that could have ever been because it trampled all the Muslims the exact same -- the only problem is that they were supporting the Germans in WWI.

So. Islam has been in a "civil war" for 1400 years. The problem is Henry Ford used mass-production to make the Model-A, and the entire rest of the world has been using internal combustion engines ever since then. The problem is that, through a freak of nature and geography, Islam has been bolstered by the resource of oil. This has fueled their ability to buy technology which they otherwise could not have developed on their own. This is the artifical support with which their religion has "flourished" with for 100 years, giving some tribes an advantage over the others. "Iraq" isn't isn't in a new "civil war" since 2003. It's been in a "civil war" since 640AD (Current Era [CE] for you Godless Heathens). It's just that the Sunni have been using every barbaric tactic known to the Great Khan to keep their power over the Shi'a, not just in Iraq, but Qatar and Oman and the UAE, too.

The problem is that if we pull out of Iraq, Iran will bolster the Shi'a to litterly wipe out the Sunni. And then the Iraq Shi'a and the Iranian Shi'a will join forces. This will put a serious pressure on the Wahhabi in Saudia Arabia, and the Saudis know this.


It is the most horribly complex set of allegiances and sectarian strife that I've ever seen, even in comparison to South American drug cartels or African tribes. Or packs of wolves and heina.


I agree with your general thesis that most Arabs see their society along sectarian, not national lines. However, I would like to point out the following:

1. The roots of Anabaptism reach back to the second century AD, and were more or less fully formed at the time of Luther. Therefore, Luther, as a Catholic, was already in schism with the Anabaptists.

2. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is not decendant of the Church of England.

3. As an Anabaptist branch, the Quakers would have never been in communion with Eastern Orthodoxy.

And therefore, none of those analogies are particularly apt, as the schism between Sunni and Shi'a was timely and climatic.

Also:

4. The Ottoman Empire had innumerable problems well before even the start of the 20th century. To characterize it's support of Imperial Germany as it's sole problem is highly inaccurate.

5. The Model-T was the first automobile to be mass-produced, not the later Model-A.

6. The advent of the internal combustion engine predates Henry Ford's enterprises.

7. Ghengis Kahn was Mongolian.

Again, I agree with your thesis, but your history is spotty, at best.

[August]

Reading this thread i'm struck by the thought that some new muslim religious sect wil come along with the ability to unite the various factions and civil war turns into world war.

[Skybird]

Reading this thread i'm struck by the thought that some new muslim religious sect wil come along with the ability to unite the various factions and civil war turns into world war.
In fact a trend to unite Shia and Sunni factions is reported to be observed in Iraq, Iran and the ME since some months now. Also, the Iraq Mahdi army and the Lebanese-Palestinian Hezbollah are moving closer to each other.

[scandium]

Reading this thread i'm struck by the thought that some new muslim religious sect wil come along with the ability to unite the various factions and civil war turns into world war. In fact a trend to unite Shia and Sunni factions is reported to be observed in Iraq, Iran and the ME since some months now. Also, the Iraq Mahdi army and the Lebanese-Palestinian Hezbollah are moving closer to each other.
The leader of the rag-tag Hezbollah ('rag-tag' being the words used by an Israeli official, though I think they fit well enough), Nasrallah, is one such Pan-Arabist who has always sought to unite the Shia and Sunni (and in this he's had some success in the past, being able to gain support from both Sunni Baathist Syria and Shiite Iran) and he's attaining almost occult, hero-like status now having managed to stand up to the IDF and their overwhelming numerical and technological superiority for over 3 weeks. And the best part is that even if they kill him, his martyrdom could just as likely provide the catalyst needed for the ME countries to achieve a solidarity that they haven't remotedly known since the Six Day War. Or not -- who knows. But this is an interesting read (and there are dozens more articles from other sources echoing these sentiments):

http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/story/14289450p-15116919c.html

BEIRUT, Lebanon -- In Bah-rain, they sing songs about him. In Egypt, he's compared with their greatest modern hero. In distant Tunis, where an estimated 7,000 people marched peacefully to protest Israel's military campaign, some of them held up his photograph.

In Muslim countries as different as Syria and Malaysia, they wave his picture like the national flag.

So far, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, is the only person to emerge from the wreckage of Lebanon not only unbroken, but seemingly strengthened. As his Shiite Muslim militant group battles Israel's powerful military into an improbable fourth week, his stature in the Muslim world has never been greater.

In Washington and throughout the West, the rise of this charismatic, broadly popular Islamist is being watched closely. As his stature grows, his pronouncements will increasingly influence how the Muslim world views itself and its relationship with the West.

"Nasrallah has assumed legendary proportions," said Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, one of Lebanon's foremost experts on Hezbollah.

The bearded, baby-faced Nasrallah has been a hero to Arabs since 2000, when an 18-year Hezbollah guerrilla campaign drove Israeli troops out of southern Lebanon. That earned him a place in the same breath as Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president whose seizure of the Suez Canal from colonial control in July 1956 launched the Arab nationalist movement.

For years, Nasrallah's speeches have been watched across the Middle East on Hezbollah's satellite television station, Al Manar. Its alliances with fundamentalist Iran, which is mostly Shiite, and secular Syria, which is mostly Sunni, give Hezbollah regional reach.

Muslims from Pakistan to Nigeria have demonstrated in support of Hezbollah. Last week, Ayman al-Zawahri, the No. 2 man in al-Qaida, a Sunni group that has no love for Shiites, called on jihadists to wage war against Israel.

"Nasrallah isn't the head of a state, but a small guerrilla organization," Saad-Ghorayeb said. "Yet he has been able to bridge the Sunni-Shiite divide, as well as the Arab-non-Arab divide. The Israelis have inadvertently led him to this very unlikely stature."
This is yet another reason, as I've said over and over, that fighting "terrorist organizations" (which is a debatable term even in the case of Hezbollah, seeing as they are only classified in this category by the U.S., Canada, and Israel yet are viewed as a legitimate resistance movement in most of the rest of the world), or more generally the "War on Terror", using conventional military paradigms and tactics, and a WWII mindset is, not only a paradox but at best doomed to futility and at worse to create more polarization, more marginalization (fueling desperation), more militancy and ultimately more violence and terrorism that can only further spiral out of control.

This paradigm has been tested in Afghanistan, and even though I believed the cause just, the outcome has been a complete failure. Kharzai is no more than the mayor of Khabul, Opium production is once again in full swing, Sharia is still the law of the land, the country is at least as lawless as its ever been, Osama is still at large somewhere in the world, and meantime our countries continue to pour blood and treasure into this failed experiment; meanwhile the enemy only gains new recruits as fast as we can kill the old ones, or faster, and is continually learning - through experience - how to refine their guerrila warfare tactics to find and hit our weakspots. And in the end, just as the Soviets did, we will one day have to abandon it and thereby recreating the same conditions that led up to 9/11.

Iraq, different pretext, same failure, same consequences ultimately - but perhaps even worse due to the enmity between the Kurds in the semi-autonomous north and our Turkish Nato partner (creating a potential future schism in one of the places, Turkey, where we can least afford it) combined with the influence exerted by Iran on Iraq's mostly shiite population.

Then there is the Israeli-Lebanese conflict which hs been transparently green-lighted by the U.S. and which is based on the same failed paradigm, and may yet be the straw that breaks the camel's back (no pun intended).

Anyway, idle speculation aside, no good has come from any of this nor can it until the lunatics running the show in the U.S. and Israel are for once and for all discreditted and removed from office and a different approach is tried. That and the war criminals responsible must also be denounced as such and held accountable in an international court of law for their crimes. Maybe then their catastrophic course can be reversed, otherwise they will lead us all over the cliff in their hubris and folly.

[tycho102]

1. The roots of Anabaptism reach back to the second century AD, and were more or less fully formed at the time of Luther. Therefore, Luther, as a Catholic, was already in schism with the Anabaptists.

2. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is not decendant of the Church of England.

3. As an Anabaptist branch, the Quakers would have never been in communion with Eastern Orthodoxy.

And therefore, none of those analogies are particularly apt, as the schism between Sunni and Shi'a was timely and climatic.
Thank you, sir/madam. You missed my point, but you demonstrated my point better than I could have asked.

You see a difference between all those Christians, and that difference is fundamental to your organization of history. Others just think of them as "Christians" (many others, judging by American textbooks :D ).



4. The Ottoman Empire had innumerable problems well before even the start of the 20th century. To characterize it's support of Imperial Germany as it's sole problem is highly inaccurate.
That's where the empire ended, however. That wasn't it's "sole problem", that was it's last problem.


5. The Model-T was the first automobile to be mass-produced, not the later Model-A.
My bad. I always get those two mixed up. I keep up with planes more than cars.


6. The advent of the internal combustion engine predates Henry Ford's enterprises.
Indeed, it does. However, he mass-produced them for cars before anyone else. Locomotives were using diesel during the War of Secession, but not many.


7. Ghengis Kahn was Mongolian.
Yep. And he invaded modern day Persia and Iraq. The muslims are still pissed at him, to this very day, 800 years later. He was also pouring molten silver into the mouths and eye-sockets of enemy leaders, and massacring entire cities (300,000 inhabitants) such that the next city would surrender before fighting and killing men in his army, not afterwards. Those are tactics the muslims, themselves, were not using.

[Skybird]

Iraqi civil war already begun, say US troops :

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/15201701.htm