catapult magazine

This guy seems pretty well educated and is giving a pretty different look at Iraq than I’ve been getting.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/outlook/2487509

he’s certainly right that violence sells more newspapers and makes the evening news a lot more exciting than peace initiatives would. i wonder if this idea has been tried and proven true, though. i mean, wouldn’t we all love to see schools being built, people being lifted from poverty to dignity, etc.? is it the case, then, that the media only shows us violence for ideological reasons? i suppose it’s possible (some would say likely), but an overview of the way the war has been covered from the beginning leads me to doubt this conclusion.

i do applaud mr. roche’s efforts to help us see the other side of combat (though i admittedly do so with caution).

Roche serves with the U.S. Army’s 16th Combat Engineer Battalion in Iraq and is an adjunct fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative think-tank.

I’m sure good things are happening, but if you’ve been watching the news the past few days, you’ll know it’s not just a few terrorists anymore. In Felluja, it was a mob that committed attrocities, not foreign suicide bombers. And in Baghdad an Army of Shiites (thousands) took over police stations and battled US solidiers. My impression is that it’s getting harder and harder to characterize these incidents as terrorism when they are taking on more and more the look of resistance. some parts of Iraq are surely better off now than they were, but my impression is that large parts of the Iraqi population are becoming more and more angry with the US presence. I’m not happy about that, but I don’t think it is surprising. Nor is it surprising that a Bush-supporting think-tank would have us think otherwise.

This article is about sewage treatement in Baghdad, but this reporter gives insight into the daily life of sodiers and foreigners in Iraq.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/19/international/middleeast/19SEWA.html?hp

This is the first sewage treatment in Baghdad in 15 years but “we can’t get the word out,” said one American government engineer on the project. To the suggestion that publicity could lead to bombings and the like, the engineer said, “Well, guess what ? we’re getting bombed anyway.”

Just three days before, he said, terrorists had lobbed a concussion grenade at a car carrying an electrical engineer working on one of the three huge sewage treatment plants that are being rehabilitated in Baghdad. (Two of them have not yet started processing sewage.)

At one point a sand-blasting machine was suddenly turned on somewhere and two of the people in the party, including the American government engineer, hit the deck, thinking it was a mortar attack.

The plant was all quite impressive, but somehow unsatisfying, since nothing was actually being treated yet. The company and the development agency said the other plants were in areas too dangerous to visit.

here’s an entry at snopes.com regarding this letter. and here’s a blog entry about the letter at orwellian times.

i ran across these the other day and thought i had read this letter before, so i thought i’d post them here for discussion. the original link to the letter doesn’t work anymore, but both of these sites contain the complete text.

My impression is that it’s getting harder and harder to characterize these incidents as terrorism when they are taking on more and more the look of resistance. some parts of Iraq are surely better off now than they were, but my impression is that large parts of the Iraqi population are becoming more and more angry with the US presence. I’m not happy about that, but I don’t think it is surprising. Nor is it surprising that a Bush-supporting think-tank would have us think otherwise.

The pockets of resistance of which we hear on and in the news are in primarily strong Muslim areas. That’s a very important fact. These are not simple bands of unsatisfied citizens resisting the actions of arrogant Americans. It’s ideology vs. ideology at the core.

Before it was about saving Iraqis from their ruthless dictator. Now it’s about suppressing their “ideology.” Weren’t Iraqis supposed to have the freedom to chose their own leaders and ideologies?

mrsanniep: Most of Iraq is a strong Muslim area. The rest of Iraq is Kurdistan, in which American troops are virtually absent. So I agree with you, most of the insugents are in Iraq proper, not Kurdistan, but I don’t know why that’s important.

Dan, there’s a common link here. Removing Saddam and “suppressing their ideology” both have to do with protecting lives, the lives of innocent Americans in particular who are funding the war and who demanded the war.

Islam is not merely an ideology. In another discussion area I posted a link to www.levant.info. Two articles there defend the idea that Islam is more than merely a religion. If it were a religion like Christianity or Buddhism or a host of others, then the fact that terrorism is coming largely from Muslims wouldn’t be all that important. As it is, Islam is both religion and state. However, it would be naive to think that Islam has no connection with current terrorism in Iraq or hatred of America, which they see as largely Christian, since they do not make a distinction between church and state.

Suppressing an ideology would be against our commitment to “freedom of religion” if it didn’t threaten and murder innocent human life, American life in particular. Muslims (I have in mind particulary those in the middle east) hate America because it is, in many of their eyes, Christian, and because we support Israel. If we withdrew our support from Israel, Israel would be greatly weakened and probably collapse. Muslims know this. This is part of the reason they and other terrorists have targeted America.

I’d like to explore the importance of Islam for our current situation more. Is Islam a threat to America (and the world)? Is it a threat to Christianity? In what ways?

I want to love Muslims. It’s my duty as a Christian. What if their commitments to a false religion mean that they will not reciprocate? Do we have the moral fortitude to love Muslims as our neighbors and hate Islam as a religion that sets people against the one true God?

I didn’t have the fortitude to respond to this post before but I can’t let it sit.

You say that Islam is different from Christianity, Buddhism, and other religions because it is both a state and a religion. I disagree. In some countries Islam is the state religion, and the law of the state is based on the Koran (Iran for example). However, there are secular states composed of a majority of Muslims (Turkey for example). There are peace-loving Muslims (the majority) and there are Muslims who want to kill infidels (the minority but they get on TV).

Other religions can turn into just about anything as well. There are states where the Christian church and the state are essentially represented by the same person (England and the Church of England for example). Historically, most Christian countries have not made a clear distinction between church and state (Rome, Constantinople, France before the Revolution, Russia 988-1917AD). I’d also like to remind you that there exist both a Buddhist kingdom (Bhutan), and a Hindu kingdom (Nepal).

I’d also like to suggest that the USA is not very good at keeping religion and politics separate although it is specified in the constitution. Muslims are not the only ones who think that the current Whitehouse is motivated by fundamentalist Christian impulses which tend to divide people rather than unite them. I would also like to remind you of the militant Sikhs who bombed Air India jets in the 1980s, and of the fundamentalist Christians who shoot doctors who perform abortions, and others who bomb federal government buildings.

You’re going to have to make a better case for the uniqueness of Islam. Yes, it can take on political and potentially violent forms, but so can every other religion. Even Mennonites (government-phobia, violence-phobia, good-deeds-philia) can be jerks sometimes.

some mixes of christianity and politics:
[list:bc273fe3d3]:bc273fe3d3]mennonites: kingdom of munster
[:bc273fe3d3]calvinists: geneva[/list:u:bc273fe3d3]

a bit of an aside, but interesting nonetheless in the context of this discussion. also, there might be better resources out there; these are simply the first relevant links i found.

back to your regularly scheduled programming …

Those are good examples laurencer, but a quick correction: the reason why Mennonites are still around today is because there were NOT involved in the Munster incident. The culprit ideology/religion/politic was a different non-pacifist Anabaptist sect which was subsequently wiped out for national security reasons. Mennonites and Hutterites survived because they were pacifist which meant that their neighbours knew that they were no threat. Regardless, this is a fantastic story and you should read it:
http://www.newsoftheodd.com/article1010.html