Ouch My Head Hurts!

It has always been a habit of mine to play devils advocate. So here it goes:

To offhandedly dismiss the view of the Islamic fundamentalist is a great way of diminishing your ability to defend yourself and underestimating the enemy's resolve.

A bunch of guys didn't just get up one morning and decide to fly a plane into a building, anymore than the countless suicide bombers thought "I'm board, I think I'll blow myself up." Part of warfare is finding what motivates your enemies and removing that motivation. It took an enormous amount of hatred to torture a little old lady on a doomed aircraft. Palestinians didn't dance in the streets on 9/11 because they live in a happy shiny place. You may not like the culture you call Islamofascism, but guess what, they don't like you either.

They don't like you propping up their corrupt governments with money and arms. They don't like those governments selling us oil at bargain basement prices. They don't like us supporting a colony of invading foreigners (Israel) in the middle of their region. They don't like us supplying Iraq with WMD, and then invading it for having them. They don't like our culture, our values or our religion. They feel powerless, disrespected and really pissed off.

Now we can have WWIV if you really want to (I always count the cold war as WWIII), or you can admit that oil and religion are the reasons we have meddled in these people's affairs. We were doing bad things in their countries long before they returned the favor. Either openly admit we are in the empire business or get off the oil drug and let Israel sink or swim on its own.

Some might call this viewpoint "moral relativism". I call it being able to see the other side's viewpoint. A reasonable and intelligent person can look both right and left and see the value of both sides.

Try this as a mental exercise:

Imagine you were born in the Middle East (say Saudi Arabia). Instead of fundamentalist Christianity you have been expose to fundamentalist Islam since before you could speak. You accept that your culture and history is "civilization", and that the West is populated by godless infidels. You see foreign oil companies and governments cozying up to your ruler while supplying him with billion in petrol dollars and military equipment. You see Israel armed with American F-16's and apache helicopter shooting at Palestinians armed with slingshots. Now what are you going to think about America as this person?

Now maybe you don't give a damn. You know your right and they are wrong and that is all there is to life. Your god is stronger than theirs and you will win because you are moral, right thinking people and they are savages. All we need to do is kill them till they surrender or their society crumbles do to internal rot.

But the Middle East is not Germany or the Soviet Union. There is not a capital to capture and we are supplying the terrorists with billions of petrol dollars every year to continue their work. So rather than another 50 year cold war maybe we should consider another course. One that actively pursues a course of reducing oil usage and a more even handed approach to Israel.

PS: I believe we import about 50% of our oil. What do you think the price would be if OPEC turned off the tap? Certainly not 30 dollars a barrel, more like a hundred or more. So if you were the steward of a limited national resource would it not be a good idea to get top dollar for that limited resource. If they cut their production in half they could easily get twice as much per barrel. Supply, demand and the world economy obviously play a part but the long-term cozy political relationship between the Saudi and U.S. governments is pretty important to.

PPS: The Middle East governments were corrupt long before we got there, but the oil money has been the equivalent of pouring gas on a campfire. A flood of money tends to corrupt the people that make up a government. It has always been my personal philosophy that a society should be left alone to sink or swim on its own. Whether its Arab oil money or free military assistance to Israel, we are not doing either society any good by "helping" them. All the American military hardware has made Israel and arrogant bully. While the oil money has given a "medieval society" modern weapons and technology. Maybe I watch too much star trek but I think the "prime directive" is a good idea.

PPPS: As for the "empire business": What was the reason we are in Iraq, I keep loosing track? WMD? Humanitarian mission? Democracy? Saddam's funny hat collection? Terrorist? Oil? What ever happens in Iraq it will be 20 years before their prime minister takes a leak without our permission. Why not just hoist the American flag and remove all doubt.

I have intentionally "loaded" this little rant using an Arab view. They have a particular world view crafted from the information sources available to them (mosques and Arab TV). I imagine this world view filter shows us as “bad” just as our filter shows ourselves as “good”. So I wrote from that world view.

I don't know what view is “valid”. I couldn't justify flying a plane into a building full of people, but they obviously could, since they did it. I will let history judge who was “right”. An argument can be made that Nazism and communism started for valid reasons, but then the system they produced created consequences that invalidated them as solutions. Just because they failed doesn't mean the forces that produced them were not valid.