THE FIGHT WITHIN ISLAM

To: The Albany Democrat-Herald

We are all glad there hasn't been another 9/11
attack on the U. S. Certainly another such attack
would be much more difficult to bring off now. Be-
sides, it isn't necessary, from the other side's point
of view. Bin Laden himself said the purpose of 9/11
was to provoke the U. S. into over-reacting by
attacking a Muslim country. MISSION ACCOM-
PLISHED!

We attacked not one, but two Muslim countries, and
Mr. Bush wants us to take on a third! Don't we have
our hands full now, Mr. President? As it is, we are
bogged down in two hostile countries without any
honorable way to either get out, or stop the killing.

They don't need to come here to kill us. We have
made that easy for them by going there. Since we
aren't achieving political progress there, we are just
treading water. We have armed and trained a na-
tional police (500,000 strong), a national army (300,
000) and are paying $300 a month to 93,000 Sunnis
not to fight us, and to fight al Qaida in Iraq instead!
If you add our 151,000 G. I.s and another 150,000
(armed) contractors, that's well over 1,000,000
people under arms to maintain peace there! But
there's no peace.

According to the Iraq Study Group (ISG) report, the
national police are corrupt, and heavily infiltrated by
members of various militias. It is questionable whom,
exactly, they are taking orders from. According to
numerous reports from Iraq, these police are noto-
riously brutal, and are involved in ethnic cleansing,
protection rackets, and other Mafia-type activities.
And the killing goes on. 50-some killed in one bomb
blast yesterday. Where were the police? We have
lost 18 of ours killed already this month. So we aren't
winning. If we were, we could come home. We can't.
All hell will break loose if we do. Obama surely knows
this, and needs to be more clear in acknowledging it.

There are 1.3 billion Muslims, folks! Most of them
want peace as much as we do. It's true that wishing
won't make it so. But it's also true the whole WW II
story is irrelevant to the global struggle vs. terrorism.
That one was about land. This one is about minds,
and within Islam, primarily. As Reza Aslan writes in
No God But God: "What is taking place now in the
Muslim world is an internal conflict between Muslims,
not an external battle between Islam and the West.
The West is merely a bystander -- an unwary yet
complicit casualty of a rivalry that is raging in Islam
over who will write the next chapter in history."

There isn't a Muslim country in the world that isn't
fighting violent terrorists within its own borders.
We have gotten ourselves into the middle of these
battles without a clue about what's going on and why.
To claim that we or anyone else is "winning," is to
betray our confusion. These people will eventually
fight to an exhausted draw, and/or another Saddam
will emerge like the last one, by a Darwinian struggle
for the craftiest and cruelest. While we are studying
history, folks (for those who like WW II analogies),
go a little further back and read the part about
British efforts to establish democracy in Iraq after
WW I. That one didn't work either!

jgoodwin004@centurytel.net