Moral ascendancy

I'm amazed by the diversity of opinions about the US "war on terror", but a few facts are sorely missing from some people's opinions.

The war the US is waging is not with Islam. It is just as much a peaceloving faith as Christianity. In practice, of course, both faiths have fallen short of their ideals. By a lot.

The reason that the attacks appear to be religiously motivated is because that's the only recourse that al Qaeda has for recruitment. Think about it. If someone like Billy Graham tried recruiting middle class mid-Western American young men to go on suicide missions in the name of God, how successful do you think he would be in finding recruits? Answer: Not very. The reason: Middle class mid-Western American young men (in general -- there are always exceptions) have hope and good lives to look forward to. They're not going to blow that for some abstract religious ideal, especially when it's so obviously a distortion of moral truth. The vast majority of Middle Eastern young men, on the other hand, have very little to look forward to in their lives (again, this is a generalization).

Despite the best efforts of the US administration, al Qaeda is still well funded and provides financial compensation for the families of its recruits. Poverty is such a widespread problem in that part of the world, so for most young men there, joining an extremist brigade is the only way they know of to take care of their families. Bin Laden knew this and exploited it to its full extent.

The simple truth is that the US lacks moral ascendancy. Westerners want to kill Jihadists, and Jihadists want to kill Westerners. Neither group can claim the moral high ground. The only truly effectively weapon that the US has in its arsenal is money. The man or woman who figures out how to transform the Middle East economically to benefit the majority of Arabs (rather than letting all the money get horded by an elite few Emirs and Saudis) will surely establish world peace. Maybe Bush was hoping for that in Iraq. Well, it obviously didn't work. Time to try something else, Dubya.

Unfortunately, the Bush administration seems to think that war is the highest form of action and has implied that solutions without violence are the recourse of the weak. The US needs to grow up and stop applying the beer brawl mentality on the global scale.

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