Quote:
Originally posted by legion
But from their perspective, this is essentially the way they will perceive any action. They will reason that if we could "bomb em' to the stone age", we would. They don't understand mercy like we do; they see mercy as an attempt to cover an underlying weakness. "They must be offering peace because they know they can't win. If they could win, they would and then they wouldn't have to offer peace." By doing anything short of "bombing em' to the stone age", we feed the belief that we are playing games to hide unknown weaknesses. The way arabs fight each other is by killing the soldiers, their children, their parents, their grandparents, and their pet goldfish. The only kind of warfare they understand is winning by overwhelming, ruthless, and unforgiving force. If they see an enemy not doing this, they reason it is because they can't.
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Where, oh where did you get this deep understanding of half the people in the world? At a NASCAR race tailgate party??
The root of the problem is ignorance and greed, on both sides. Ignorance on the part of the Muslim world where people are not allowed a balanced look at the world and freedoms that we take for granted, and the beligerent, proud ignorance of most Americans who think that they "know" the history of conflicts in the ME by listening to anecdotal BS analysis like the above. I do not mean to single you out here, your simplistic and uninformed beliefs are extremely common.
I do not have a background in near eastern studies, but I know people who do and I can assure you that they would shake their heads at your "summary" of ME tensions. Even the conservative experts, if they are truly experts. C. Rice is an expert. You paint a picture of a huge slice of the current human population as being blood-thirsty would-be murderers, who would cook you and your children on the BBQ grille if they could just find their way to suburban Chicago and your house, (or where ever it is that you reside).
While gross generalizations are to be avoided with large #s of people, I think that it is safe to say that the overwhelming majority of people on the planet desire to live in peace w/o poverty and worship or not worship as they choose. I do not buy the premise that the average person in South Asia, or anywhere else, gives 2 schits what you are doing in Illinois as long as it does not impact their daily life. The problem is that nations do things that adversely affect peoples' daily life in far away places that you will never learn about at the auto parts store, or where ever in the world people get their kooky ideas about people from other cultures. Maybe FOX News, I don't know. I'm not a consumer of any of that type of media.
The best thing that any of us average people can do, IMO, is educate ourselves as thoroughly as possible about other cultures and regions, knowledge is power in a democratic society and it is the only defense against leaders who will sell whatever self-serving actions or policies they need to advance at the time to an absolutely helpless and hapless electorate who can be sold simplistic crap like "nuke the ME".