| Great post, Jesse. And right ON the mark; especially with respect to your comments re: "kill or be killed", "failure to understand", "a dogma in which it is considered Holy to die in support of the cause" (all paraphrased of course). Exactly what I was alluding to in my earlier comments about our culture's inability to understand that others have different cultures and beliefs and that we HAVE to deal with them differently than what our natural inclination is. Our real problem is that OUR culture doesn't allow us to accept that depth of understanding of "difference in mindset" and that we have been taught that we lose something of ourselves if we allow ourselves to "descend" to "their" level.
Perhaps Mr. Bush should not have gone after Iraq the way he did... or perhaps he did the right thing. Only history will know the answer and even then it might be horribly obscured by the politics of the historians. Either way, the troops who are "in the thick of it" have my admiration and support. ALL the troops from the "Western World" regardless of their nationality and regardless of WHERE they are stationed. It wasn't the Western World who called it a "jihad", but that's exactly what it is. |