Despite the fact that few persons on either side of the so-called Clash of the Civilizations divide actually want a "clash", there are those zealots who feel that wholesale planetary warfare is a positive course of action for the species.
I've already discussed the rationals, why Bin Laden and his Islamist cohorts felt compelled to engage in their terrorist actions in previous posts (here and here). The nature of the Islamist mind frame, generally speaking, is that of a victim seeking vengeance to mollify either actual or perceived attacks upon him and his metaphysical being. To further the socio-political aims of its leaders, it requires a population, or at least a subset, to use the process of psychological transference, where their existing angst, anger, and inadequacies can be directly attributed to an externality that can be understood as the "other." In this case, the other is America or more generally Western civilization. For example, in an attempt to create a focus point in which they can blame the nation's inherent failings upon, the Mullahs inveigh against the "Great Satan". By transferring their own failures to America, they draw distinctions for their loyal followers of the high mindedness and virtue of their cause. As the Green Revolution of 2009 has shown however, the majority of educated Iranians and youth, which form the majority of the population, find this decades old form of propaganda tiresome and repressive.
One has to remember, that across most of the Islamic world, their rulers are little more than quisling satraps whose existence is dictated by their utility to American hegemony. With the end of the cold war and advent of a more multipolar world, these nations offer America either oil reserves or strategic geopolitical use. Equally, the governments of these nations are intimately aware of their own dependency on America's military, financial, and technical resources to exist. Weak failed states like Iraq -which has now been occupied by American forces for 19-years- and Afghanistan -occupied by NATO and Western forces for nine years- would most certainly degenerate into further civil war or complete disintegration without a firm military presence in the region; American or otherwise. Thus, while the specter of American hegemony may rankle the masses in many Islamic countries, those in control understand that if left to the demented illogic of absolute religious divinity over regional politics as espoused by factional leaders, these nations would combust into fratricidal violence and destabilize whole swaths of world. For a thousand years, these people have been ruled and governed by others, and for good reason.
On the other hand, America's religious buffoons are hopped up on pushing humanity towards Armageddon and driving a war with the Kings of the East to validate Biblical prophecies. For example, Pastor Terry Jones of Gainesville, Florida has proposed that on the 9th anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist assault on America, that his flock will burn Qu'rans (aka. the Koran). The moral equivalence argument has been made that Muslims are attacking American Christianity through the construction of the Cordoba Cultural Center in New York. The response by this lot, to this perceived slight, is to engage in a classic book burning exercise. America's Republican party through their coy electoral race-baiting strategies have unleashed the most bigoted and unstable element of its confederacy of dunces. General Petraeus, the Pentagon, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, President Obama, and numerous religious and national leaders across the world, including even PM Stephen Harper of Canada, have denounced the racism and brutal stupidity of this action, which they insist will further marginalize those who support American objectives in the Middle East and across the world.
While the military-industrial complex and the mandarins of war need and demand that this segment of idiots ferment a rational for the Pentagon's exorbitant budgets, the rest of the world needs to contain, quarantine, and sterilize these maladroits before we are further dragged into their dystopian and self-destructive fantasies.
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