Chris Naron asks a reasonable question:
Which is it? They hate us because we’re over there or because Islam is an inherently aggressive religion. Like I said in the other thread, if you want to critcize Bush for being PC about why we’re fighting the war, I’m with you. I’ll even respect the opinion that nation-building never works. But that’s not what started this whole thing. You agreed with Patty Patty Buch Buch’s assertion that they hate us for reasons all our own doing and not for ideology.
That’s simple enough. They hate us because we’re over there. If we would leave them alone, they would focus their energies in places such as India, Indonesia, the Phillipines, the former Soviet Union and Europe – in other words, what they’d been doing since the 1950s. This would arguably be more dangerous in the long term, but since the Dear Leader insists – repeatedly – that he is not leading a nation dominated by its secular elite into a religious war, it is a reality that is extraneous to the current discussion.
That’s assuming he can be taken at his word. If George Delano is lying, as I believe he has been since the beginning of the present conflict, he is going about this War on Islam in an incredibly ineffective way. This is mostly because he is following the lead of Harry Truman and LBJ in attempting to fight a war without a national consensus. As I pointed out in my article referencing Clausewitz, an attack on the heart of the Wahhabist jihad is the only way that this war can be brought to an end. Hedging it about with Shiite-run nations cobbled together by American military might will work no better than a ring of Communist nations surrounding Nazi Germany would have sufficed 60 years ago.
The important thing about the expansionist aspect of Islam is that an individual does not need to hate anyone to wage jihad against them anymore than a Christian needs to hate someone in order to assert that he is going to Hell. Most of the expansion-era Caliphs were not full of hatred like the modern terrorist leaders, they were simply fulfilling their version of manifest destiny. These two factors should not be confused.