Some believe that the war in Iraq is NOT a war against Islam…if only those in Iraq felt the same way.
Recently the Malaki administration tried to deal with the Madhi militia. al-Sadr offered that he would disban the militia, provided al-Sistani requested it. Not a word from the Ayatollah. This is relevant. Malaki’s political power is dwarfed by Sistani’s religious power. Mohammed was not Jesus. Islam’s theology leads to a theocracy. Democracy in a Muslim country is almost an oxymoron.
Republican nominee John McCain may say that we will be there 100 years, but he might as well say that we will be there for the next X-infinite years or until the democratic system we set in place elects the next Wahabi leader. Democracy has to be a grass-roots movement. It has to come from the people, nor from some exiles that represent heretics in the eyes of these Ayatollahs and other Islamic high-clerics. Democracy is a challenge to their power; they will never give in to it and as long as the religion remains alive, democratic ideals will falter in the struggle for the Arab minds.
I don’t know if its a war against islam so much as a war to control islam/the civil war that caused the collapse of iraqi society, which was the result of saddam’s actions over the course of his rule.
It’s a war against a badly-defined enemy. It’s not as dificult to win as it is to know if we have won.
The stated objective of the war was to remove Saddam. Then the ad hoc goal was to install democracy - but then the enemy becomes “everything but democracy”. Which might be just about everything in Iraq, or at least in southern Iraq. It is a stretch to think we can win that war. For some reason, bullets alone don’t seem to wipe out an entire culture, unless they wipe out all the people who practise that culture.