www.msnbc.com/news/640815.asp -> www.msnbc.com/news/640815.asp?cp1=1
America's wars have not been motivated primarily by hatred. Greed, territory, calculations about world power and Cold War ideological fervor often lay behind the fighting. But unlike the wars of Europe and Asia, ethnic and religious hatred has not been a major factor. Indeed, wartime governments found it necessary in 1898, 1917 and 1941 to drum up hatred with propaganda against Spanish, German and Japanese enemies. Once the body bags begin arriving stateside, the job takes care of itself. It is that point at which America, generally reluctant to fight, becomes the most dangerous nation on the planet. You'll need more than Allah on your side if the engineers of the Chechen war ever take charge of the war on terrorism. A plot like the one uncovered last year to poison the minds of Arab children with Pokemon cards. A very similar thing is happening today in the streets and in the mosques of Jakarta and Lahore and Muscat and Baghdad. Outrageous statements - demonstrably false statements - are presented as truth and the governments dare not say otherwise. Protesters in Lahore, Pakistan, burn an American flag on Tuesday. Flag Burning It is a great irony of politics is that when a government is dependent not on the votes of its people but rather on their willingness to tolerate its abuse, the people have a kind of crude leverage that simply doesn't exist in a democracy. And if the people insist that "America is the enemy of Allah," what business of the government is it to say otherwise? In the last two decades of the 20th century, American troops deployed to seven major war zones: Lebanon and Grenada (1982); National interests, of course, played into each of these interventions. America fought Muslims in two of those wars, yet in five of them American troops fought and died on behalf of Muslims. Marines literally rescued the PLO and evacuated Yasser Arafat and 15,000 fighting men safely to exile in Tunis, Tunisia. For their pains, the Marines and the French troops had their barracks blown up by Islamic extremists, losing over 400 soldiers between them. Nine years later, when Saddam Hussein overran the wealthy Kuwaitis, many Islamic states were indifferent until they realized the Republican Guard had Saudi Arabia in its sites as well. Oil was the overwhelming American motivation for fighting Saddam, no doubt. But then why did the good Muslims of Syria and Egypt and Malaysia send troops as well? You can make a good argument that the United States saved not Kuwait or Saudi Arabia but rather the venal regimes that run them. And the West botched the aftermath, allowing Saddam to use his people's suffering to fertilize anti-American rage. THE DECADENT WEST Indeed, what of the Israelis - whom the extremists would cast as our evil Zionist controllers? Surely, our insistence that this particular branch of the family of Abraham not be driven into the sea proves that we are the enemy of God. This may also explain, to some minds, why the United States insisted that Israel refrain from responding in kind in 1991 when Iraq fired Scud missiles into its cities? Or why successive American presidents have wasted so much time and political capital trying to cajole the hard-headed Israelis and miserably led Palestinians into a territorial compromise? For that matter, where is the "carte blanche" the Arab press assumed America would issue to Israel in the wake of the bombings? Quite to the contrary, Washington finally knocked Israeli and Arab heads together and told them to get on with peace talks. Then again, what would the residents of Dresden or Stalingrad or Tokyo or or Hiroshima make of that theory? Is the West incapable of the kind of slaughter that al-Qaida offers up to Allah? In fact, if we're just talking about pure numbers, we're a hell of a lot better at it. British bombers incinerated as many as 50,000 people in a single night in Dresden in 1945. American bombers bettered them later that year, killing up to 100,000 in the fire- bombings of Tokyo. Yet these were acts taken against enemies that struck first, years into wars that even today stand as warnings to us about the importance of never letting fanatics gain the upper hand again.
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