Reply #16: true, yet...

[Lexingtonian]

1. Because WWII was fought with what I would call more primitive weapons, its impact on populations like Fallujah would have been far less severe in my opinion. I have heard it said that some of our new eapons, which were used in theaters like Fallujah, could lay waste to an entire city block in a matter of minutes. That is what I was trying to say when I talk about the ferocity of the new weapons. I am sure that the wide area covered by WWI the barbarism of the Nazis compensated for the lack of these modern weaponry with the zeal with which the Untermenschen were treated.

Well...the idea in Fallujah was to discourage the Iraqi resistance's idea that they could just wage an urban guerrilla war. That's why the place got flattened- to discourage further Fallujah Uprisings. But it has plenty of precedent- Tokyo/Yokohama, Dresden and Hiroshima, the destruction of Hue in Vietnam. Maybe those bombs and shells were weaker than those used now, but they made up for it simply by throwing in more. The point is to demonstrate overkill and the willingness to impose it. That was not a message consistent with being in the country to achieve democracy, in the case of Fallujah, of course. But the Bushies see stuff according to their needs, not the realities, and they imagine Iraqis see the guerillas as "terrorists" or VC as they do.

2.When I talked about the puppet regimes coming to an end because of Bush's adventure in Iraq, I wanted to say that they are going to be replaced by fundamentalist Islamic regimes of the Taliban variety.May be I should have been more explicit. That, in turn, would ensure the pursuit of WMD's by those regimes.With Islamic regimes like Pakistan that want to create Islamic Bombs, and countries like North Korea ready to sell missile technology to all comers, the day is not far off for every country to own its own bomb and delivery system much like the old days every country had to have an airline of its own.

Saudi Arabia has official Wahabiism, most other Islamic countries are far more traditional than the media tends to portray- the Islamic clergy has far greater power than most people think, but it's not as apparent because it's not overt and works only on a local level. The Islamic Bomb concept exists only because Israel has had a regional monopoly and has used it coercive capacity. I don't think fundie theocracy= need WMD. Iran is the only country overtly ruled in such a way, it happens to want/have/desire/need nukes as a matter of coincidence of sorts and historical accident of the U.S. being the Shah's big ally. Pakistan is a military dictatorship and its only serious, too-large-to-defeat, enemy/obsession is India.

3. I do not think that the hatred toward the West in Islamic countries is confined to reactionaries.There is a widespread feeling among Muslims of having been violated and humiliated by the Western nations.And, I do believe that our own feelings of Muslims being terrorists is confined to 'reactionaries'. It is also quite widespread.

There is a great distinction in how far the enlightened go vs. how far the unenlightened go in their views and actions. The unenlightened behave according to what rules they think there really are, and those tend to be the most 'traditional' views, which are the ones that reactionaries spew all the time. The reactionary p.o.v. tends to be the bottom line, and people of your society cannot fully disavow you or fully disagree with you if you behave according to it- which they can with any other p.o.v.

Having said all that I hope you, as a person, with obviously a greater grasp of history,are right about this thing being played out to avenge old resentments.I am not sure that an Iranian or an Iraqi or an Afghan is going to see it quite that way.

Perhaps not, and their concern is not what the patterns of American history and the excuses/explanations of American historians are. But it's not as if Iranians, Iraqis, and Afghanis are blind or insensible to the oppressions and bad rulers and criminal minions in their own society- they know them better than we possibly could, of course. And to the extent that their individual subsocieties are so definitely tribal, there is no need for them to be defensively tribalist. Their problem is not the violence but the inadequate discrimination the American/allied side employs, which ups the amount of violence and its duration.

I think you're fishing a bit too hard for reasons to expect extreme violence against Americans, as some kind of righteous retribution for American arrogance and coerced hegemony. Well, that's a bit too easy. They see it as one thing for Americans to get involved in taking out an obsolete dictator-which they are powerless to do themselves-, another when Americans decide to dictate internal social and (non)prosperity arrangements of an Islamic society.

The problem in the way the Bush Administration has done things lies in the way they don't consider average people as anything but marks or obstacles. They're horrifyingly feudal in their approach, which would nonetheless almost work if they had any nobility whatsoever. But they botch everything and stand for all the wrong things- they've managed to make the U.S. appear to be a retrogressive force in the world, which immensely confuses and annoys people who thought the U.S. was the one reliable progressive political force.