It goes far beyond that... It's not merely that they do not want us "in the Middle East"... the Muslim extremists want us to NO LONGER EXIST.

Negotiation is impossible in such a situation. The people that think that we can resolve the issue through diplomacy are a total joke... The word "naive" doesn't even BEGIN to describe it.

When your opponent is unwilling to accept ANY outcome other than your total destruction.... Exactly what is there to negotiate?


Mike

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1979 300 SD
350,000 miles
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1982 300D-gone---sold to a buddy
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1985 300TD
270,000 miles
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1994 E320
not my favorite, but the wife wanted it

www.myspace.com/mikemover
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Only a small percentage actually want the total destruction of the west. And many who do want that surely know that it's impossible anyway.

In addition to defense, we need to remove the burrs in their saddle. Just GTF out of their lands, at least in our current imperialist overlord status. Won't be easy.

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Te futueo et caballum tuum

1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

I believe it is happening.

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Okay, given that what you believe is or maybe true, how does that affect or apply to the question that started this thread?

B

That is probably true. It is also probably only a small percentage of Iranians who wouldl give nuclear weapons to terrorists and only a small percentage of terrorists who would willingly exterminate a city, given a chance. Small comfort.

Okay, how would you protect the planetary energy supply?

I don't mean in theory sometime down the road when we are totally disengaged from the M.E. at which time of course, all of those violent Jihadists will no longer want the atheistic infidel Great Satan defeated, I mean right now.

I don't believe this adminstration has any intention of actually winning the 'war'. so the question is beside the point.

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1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

It's getting somewhat tiresome listening to the moral equivalency of radical Islam and Christian Fundementalism. It's a stupid argument at the root and one need only to compare the Taliban as it used to be in Afghanistan and Aceh province in Indonesia to our bible belt (the heart of Christian fundementalism) to see the glaring difference. I would challenge anyone who believes there is a comparison to go to Aceh and have a drink of scotch in front of a mosque there and do the same thing in front of a pentacostal church in Alabama. I've done the latter, actually it was bourbon, I'm not stupid enough to do the former. I suspect none of the morally superior folks who tsk-tsk at the childishness of both fundementalist christians and muslims alike are smart enough not to as well, yet probably wouldn't admit to the glaring difference between the two.



BTW, Chris Bell, you nailed it.

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

The thread title is about how to win and you offer something not quite what the thread starter requested.

Why not start a new thread that doesn't hijack this one? I'll bet folks would just love to jump in on that theory of yours.

I've been noticing quite a few editorials in Canadian press lately about radical Islam. From Ottowa and Toronto mosty. Interesting trend, considering the past several years.

Robert Fulford
National Post

Saturday, August 05, 2006

The warriors of Hezbollah, Party of God, are serious men fighting a serious war, but what inspires them? Among guerrilla gangs, they are top of the class: obedient, clever, efficient, secretive -- and of course, willing to sacrifice themselves and their families. They are not afraid of death, nor do they show pity for neighbours killed when they hide military operations among women and children. Clearly, the Hezbollah warriors are driven by much more than salaries received from Iran.

They hate Jews and, because they fear Sunni Muslims, they badly want to keep power in Shiite hands. But is that enough? Does that explain why they have been preparing for this war for so long? A cleric who interrupted his theological studies to rejoin Hezbollah in June, and who claims to be descended from the prophet Muhammad, says, "We had six years to prepare for this day."

Above all, they are patient. One of them recently told a reporter from Britain's Guardian how their leaders drilled them in serenity: "During our training we spend days in empty buildings without talking to anyone or doing anything. They tell me go and sit in that building, and I go and sit there and wait." In every mission, they follow detailed orders without question. When they send off a rocket, they expect an Israeli response within 15 minutes, so immediately their team breaks up, everyone running to an assigned hiding place. Later they re-form elsewhere, for their next launch.

Behind all this is a religious passion that's so powerful few of us can begin to grasp it. More than two decades ago, the Ayatollah Khomeini, by licensing Hezbollah as a franchise of Iran, focused the minds of a few thousand young men on the ideal of Islamic world hegemony. Like Christianity, Islam imagines itself a universal religion, which all humans will eventually embrace. Much of Christianity has abandoned that dream, but in Islam it remains vividly alive, notably among terrorist factions like Hezbollah.

Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, has said several times that he knows Israel's weak point: its belief in preserving human life. Israel has a nuclear weapon and the region's strongest air force, he says, but "in truth, it is weaker than a spider web." He believes reverence for life, combined with a hedonistic society, make it incapable of sustained war. He has large ambitions. Muhammad Al-Huni, an eminent Libyan intellectual who lives in Italy, recently wrote that Nasrallah now assumes that he "enjoys the stature of the holy men and prophets."

U.S.-based Islam expert Daniel Pipes says that radical Islam is the problem, moderate Islam the solution. But possibly the radicals are the only Muslims with a passion to shape the future. By definition, moderates take a relaxed view of religion. However fervent their beliefs, they also value families, friends, human love, and worldly satisfactions. They want peace and won't eagerly kill for Allah. If they are like most people of moderate views, they can be frightened into silence.

But Hezbollah wants an Islamic world and believes such a world to be worth killing and dying for. Recently, that way of organizing society has crept into another corner of the globe. After a 29-year separatist struggle, the Indonesian province of Aceh won the right to adopt Shariah criminal law, becoming the first region of that country (a theoretically secular state) with that privilege. The radicals have beaten the moderates, and now the moderates face a dreadful future.

In Aceh, roaming Taliban-like squads of vice police in brown uniforms now tour the streets, looking for men drinking alcohol or women consorting with men other than their husbands. These people are then caned outside mosques, watched by crowds and TV cameras. Women claim they are more often the objects of vice-squad raids than men. Ordinary citizens sometimes grab couples sitting in parked cars and hand them over to the vice police. The same rules govern foreigners. An Italian aid worker, accused of having a little marijuana and being seen alone with a woman (his translator) is imprisoned, faced with caning. The vice police are turning into a steadily expanding bureaucracy -- and other provinces are now talking about following Aceh's example. So now a great religion, which once inspired enviable poetry, philosophy and architecture, has reduced itself to promoting institutionalized thuggery.

That's the world Hezbollah desires. It seems clear that the crisis in the Middle East is a struggle for a decent civilization. Given that truth, anyone arguing that the West should remain neutral looks like either a fool or a scoundrel.

robert.fulford@utoronto.ca

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

That's great. This administration will be gone in two years. I guess we can discuss winning the war then.

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

Metaphorically "Grow a pair" and do more than your enemy. Just like in business. Doing what worked yesterday is worthless. Doing what is done today is ok. Doing what is more than your competition is doing, that is the ticket. He breaks a leg of yours, you cut off 2 of his legs. He blinds you in one eye, you take out two eyes and break a jaw and scalp him. He isn't going into the fight with one arm behind his back, why should you? Learn the rules of combat instead of insisting that your enemy follow yours.

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Previously, our biggest socio-political "enemy" was world wide communism. Luckily, we did not have to go "toe to toe" with the Soviets. What's wrong with that victory as a basis for an approach with dealing with the threat of global fundamental . . . whatever the buzzwords are now?

"Terrorism" can't be fought. It's not a government, it's anyone. To some people, WE (the usa) are the terrorists.

Nice in theory, but impossible in practice.

As an example, lets say we gather 1000 people who are just like you as much as possible. Same race, education, hair color, you name it. We try and make the group as homogenous as possible. If we put that group on an island together, they would find a way to segregate themselves into smaller groups, some of which would be at odds with other groups. Its a fact of ANIMAL (not only human) existence.

There will always be haves and have nots. There will always be inter-group resentment even if illogical. We cannot legislate that to change. And by the very definition of American culture, we can't. We embrace diversity, which means we are *not* the same and we are back to suare 1. Pure socialism is the closest way to get people on equal footing so they don't kill each other, and socialism is usually characterized as a whole ot of people in poverty-food fight!

And if the other side is willing to kill us for *whatever* reason, the only way is to exterminate them. Because poverty CULTURES have nothing to lose except life, and that has very little value to some of them. The richer cultures are the more peaceful ones because they have more to LOSE.

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MB-less

Most people who live in poverty are not a threat to peace on a global scale.

B